Green Gold: Our Love Affair With Olive Oil (encore)

Speaker 1 Hello, Gastropod listeners. We have a special episode for you.
It's an Encore presentation of one of our favorites. I mean, of course, they're all our favorites.

Speaker 3 Choosing between children.

Speaker 1 But this one is about something Nikki and I consume literally every day, and that's olive oil.

Speaker 7 We get into how to taste it, how to harvest it, but more importantly, how to make sure you're not being ripped off and that the extra virgin olive oil you're selling out the big bugs for is the real deal.

Speaker 12 This is life-changing advice, honestly, because the difference between real and fake is pretty intense, and the fake stuff is everywhere.

Speaker 1 Listen, enjoy, and pour some olive oil all over your food.

Speaker 9 Heck, slather it all over your body if you're Cynthia.

Speaker 1 True, and we'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode.

Speaker 17 Oh, wow.

Speaker 17 Let me know if I'm like hurting the tree or

Speaker 18 it's really fun.

Speaker 17 There we go, yeah.

Speaker 17 It's very gratifying.

Speaker 1 Like, olives just go flying off in all directions at your whim.

Speaker 1 You asked for it. We've made it.
An episode all about olive oil. This is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
I'm Cynthia Graeber.

Speaker 20 And I'm Nicola Twilley.

Speaker 10 And that was the sound of my friend and Gastropod fan, Sarah Sklarsik, harvesting olives by combing through the branches using a vibrating electric rake.

Speaker 23 So maybe, maybe this is like a really deep tissue massage for an olive tree.

Speaker 19 I like it.

Speaker 19 It feels like you're stroking it, stroking and tickling.

Speaker 18 But kind of rough, right?

Speaker 23 I mean, it's kind of like, mmm.

Speaker 2 That's my friend Robin Sloan, co-owner of both the olives and the vibrating rake.

Speaker 20 Cynthia and I visited the olive grove he leases in the Bay Area to learn what olive oil actually is and how you make it.

Speaker 1 But that's not all we wanted to find out about the green gold this episode. You might have heard that people have been enjoying olive oil for thousands of years.

Speaker 1 Is it true that ancient Greeks and Romans smeared the stuff all over their bodies?

Speaker 11 And what on earth does extra virgin actually mean?

Speaker 30 Like, how can something be more virginal than a virgin?

Speaker 32 That doesn't even make sense.

Speaker 1 And something a lot of you wanted to know: is the extra virgin olive oil in your pantry the real deal? That's what listener Brenda Vest thought after she heard an episode of ours last spring.

Speaker 33 Like, I love listening to your podcast. That's like the fake foods one really got me.
I was like, oh my God, I hope they do an olive oil one.

Speaker 5 Brenda's wish was our command.

Speaker 1 So here we go. Castropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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Speaker 35 Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.
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Speaker 35 It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

Speaker 35 You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea.
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Speaker 35 Time for a pure leaf.

Speaker 36 My favorite ones are the thousand year trees, the grandfather trees or grandmother trees, some of which, you know, the Crusaders saw on their way south to the Holy Lands to break some stuff.

Speaker 1 Tom Mueller wrote the book Extra Virginity, the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. These olive trees, they genuinely can live for hundreds, even a thousand years.

Speaker 5 Tom says olive trees are hardcore.

Speaker 15 You can chop them off at ground level and they'll spring back.

Speaker 31 They've been growing wild in the Mediterranean for millennia.

Speaker 36 The oleaster or wild olive has provided food for people and pre-people for a long, long time.

Speaker 36 I mean there are olive pits in Neanderthal caves in Gibraltar and leaves and pits in various Paleolithic and Neolithic sites where Homo sapiens was collecting small olives of the oleaster, berries, basically, hunting and gathering berries.

Speaker 1 The hardy, productive olive tree has long been the focal point of human settlements.

Speaker 36 It's quite inspiring to see these huge ancient braided trunks, sometimes with marks of war on them, with ancient fires that they've survived.

Speaker 20 We didn't get to visit any grandfather or grandmother trees this episode, but I'm not complaining because we did get to go to two olive groves, one in the old world and one in the new.

Speaker 38 I'm growing here in Castello del Trebio.

Speaker 1 Anna and her husband own about 10,000 olive trees spreading over the hills in Tuscany, not too far from Florence. We were there on a sunny summer morning.

Speaker 1 The trees stretched out around us, the leaves were rippling in the breeze.

Speaker 38 I think the olive tree is

Speaker 38 unbelievable because he has some leaves that have different kinds of color.

Speaker 38 And depending if you have the wind, the flu going on, each time you are looking at the olive tree, it changed color. It came from silver to green.

Speaker 2 And then on an equally sunny day at the end of october we visited a much smaller olive grove precisely 327 trees it was near fremont just south of san francisco in california i'm robin sloan and i'm the co-founder of fat gold and i'm a novelist too i'm catherine tomogen i'm also the co-founder of fat gold and i am an olive oil maker by trade catherine first visited this grove as a consultant she'd been brought in to help its owners make better oil.

Speaker 16 I was just awestricken because it was a beautiful time of year and the hills were still green and it was basically the prettiest olive grove I'd seen in my travels, especially in California.

Speaker 10 So when the current owners were getting old and wanted to scale back their workload, Catherine and Robin decided to lease the grove themselves.

Speaker 1 Both of the groves we visited have a handful of different kinds of olive trees growing. Tom says there are more than 600 different subspecies of domesticated olives total.

Speaker 1 Different varieties grow better in different ecosystems, or people choose the subspecies they like based on flavor.

Speaker 34 Catherine and Anna's groves have pretty similar varieties.

Speaker 16 We have six different varieties that are planted here. Most of them are traditional Tuscan varieties, and those are Frantoyo, Lachino, Merino, Moriolo, and Pendolino.

Speaker 16 And then we also have a sixth called Tajasca, which is an olive variety that is traditionally from Liguria, the Liguria region of Italy, which is on the Mediterranean coast.

Speaker 5 What's kind of cool is you can really quickly start to tell these different varieties apart in the grove, even if you've never really paid attention to the shape of an olive tree before.

Speaker 16 And this is the morino. That one looks kind of fuzzy and hairy.
I kind of like the way that one looks. And this one here is the Moriolo, which I think is my favorite.

Speaker 23 But it's like the mopey moriolo. They're also sort of droopy.

Speaker 16 And then this is the pendolino, and that real bushy, very vigorous one is the tajasca.

Speaker 1 The The varieties that both Anna and Catherine have on their properties, they've been growing in the Mediterranean for thousands of years.

Speaker 1 Olive trees first came to California with the Spanish missionaries in the 1600s.

Speaker 16 And California had a robust olive canning industry throughout the last century. And then canned olives have kind of fallen out of fashion.

Speaker 16 And I think probably in the late 80s, early 90s, people started really wanting to plant olives for olive oil. And so this modern era of olive oil production was born in California.

Speaker 16 And then in the last 20 years the olive industry has exploded.

Speaker 27 And one of the main reasons behind that explosion is a new way of planting, growing and harvesting olives.

Speaker 11 It's called super high density planting and what it means is the olives are planted really close together in very tight rows and they're pruned in a particular way so that they can be machine harvested.

Speaker 1 One of the benefits of this super high density style of planting is that it's made olive oil economically viable in California.

Speaker 1 As you all probably know, land is extremely expensive in California, and so is labor.

Speaker 16 Since then, we've seen olive productivity explode in California and the industry really being able to make olive oil at an affordable price point for people or for consumers that are had never heard of California olive oil before.

Speaker 13 Basically, the way these Californian groves are planted and pruned means you can take a lot of the labor costs out of the equation by using a machine to do the harvesting.

Speaker 16 And when I say machine harvested, I mean there's a huge machine that goes over and basically swallows the entire olive tree and has these sort of rubbery fingers that knocks the olives off and there's a sort of a catch basin underneath and it goes over an entire row of olives without stopping harvesting every tree in that row.

Speaker 16 So it's actually really interesting and exciting and I do a lot of work with super high density olives but

Speaker 16 you know there's something pretty special about the traditionally spaced where they let them grow to their their full maturity and beauty.

Speaker 1 Catherine and Robbins Grove has trees more traditionally spaced, wider wider apart, and it is indeed gorgeous. Plus they can grow a wider variety of olives with different flavors.

Speaker 1 Only three varieties currently work well with a super high density system.

Speaker 1 Nikki, you and I visited it together, but you also got to go help out when they were harvesting the trees, which I unfortunately missed.

Speaker 7 Yes, turns out that even though I am a Californian now, I am actually very cost-effective labor.

Speaker 26 Free, in fact.

Speaker 37 Robin and Catherine gathered a group of their friends early one Saturday morning to help out.

Speaker 23 The olives have been growing on the trees the whole year. As you'll see when we harvest them, they're quite dark and they're already quite oily, like they are ready.

Speaker 23 They're bursting with oil, ready for the oil to be extracted. So here's the steps of what we're doing today.

Speaker 14 Step one, lay out some nets under the trees to catch the olives.

Speaker 28 Here, so let's go, let's pull it in as tight as you can. Excuse me.

Speaker 42 Step two, fire up the vibrating rakes.

Speaker 23 So I think for all the people who are going to be using the magic wand, the vibrating rake,

Speaker 2 whatever,

Speaker 2 The vibrators. Um

Speaker 23 it's gonna be a learning curve to learn like how we do it.

Speaker 23 Like, and so we just don't actually know what the best technique is for getting all the fruit off and kind of like, who knows what it's gonna be like.

Speaker 10 That's right. None of us had ever done this before.

Speaker 12 Not even Catherine.

Speaker 28 Oh my gosh, we're totally gonna try this.

Speaker 28 So give it a shot.

Speaker 18 Let's see what happens.

Speaker 44 It was weird and super fun. You just kind of combed the vibrating rake through the branches and the olives started whizzing off in all directions.

Speaker 1 You said nobody had ever done it before. Was there a steep learning curve? Did you watch a video on YouTube or something?

Speaker 37 No instruction needed.

Speaker 9 We were all just naturals.

Speaker 6 Honestly, it was like if you've ever groomed a pet, you get a feel for how to move the rake through the branches really quickly.

Speaker 16 Yeah, they're pretty hard.

Speaker 19 A bunch of us held up the nets at the edges and then others, including a handful of kids, followed behind with buckets and harvesting the olives that the rakes had left behind.

Speaker 13 Some of those olives really didn't want to leave home.

Speaker 1 Catherine and Robin had a great time at their very first olive harvest, but earlier the summer things were looking a little grim. They had an infestation of the olive farmer's nemesis, the olive fly.

Speaker 16 That's basically a fruit fly that has a very symbiotic relationship with olives. So they lay their eggs in the olive and the larvae eat their way out, essentially ruining the fruit.

Speaker 16 So there was a few weeks where we started seeing some damage, some damaged fruit, and I definitely freaked out. I was like, I don't know, I don't think this farming thing is for me.

Speaker 16 It's like an emotional roller coaster. It's all these ups and downs.

Speaker 1 They used a number of organic measures to get rid of the olive flies. They even hand-picked contaminated olives to stop the fly from spreading.

Speaker 1 But there were a few fly-bitten olives left when we visited.

Speaker 16 You want to break one of these open just to see the inside

Speaker 16 and kind of see what it does to the fruit. You can see.
Ah, there's the worm.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 So gross. There's the little it.

Speaker 16 It's very disgusting. So basically most of our effort during the year, with the exception of pruning and harvesting, the third biggest task for us is protecting our fruit from the olive fly.

Speaker 28 I should say here that the entire orchard looked like some kind of ghost orchard art installation.

Speaker 20 Catherine and Robin had sprayed the trees with white clay as a coating on the olives to try to stop the fly from getting in.

Speaker 11 And all that clay, I ended up completely coated in it myself while I was harvesting.

Speaker 5 My hair was a solid clay particle-based structure by the end of the day.

Speaker 1 This isn't only a problem in California. The olive fly is a huge threat to groves in Tuscany, too.
Anna's been battling it herself lately, and it's only getting worse because of climate change.

Speaker 1 The winters are just too warm. They don't always get cold enough to kill the flies.

Speaker 38 And we are always about 2-3% that it's nothing. In the last year, we've grown up since 7-8%.

Speaker 38 And you have to take care.

Speaker 38 But every year you have more and more. And this has happened because we don't have any more cold winter.
She's not dying. She's still there waiting that the new season came.

Speaker 1 Anna has her mind on olive flies. She isn't yet worried about a different disease that's basically decimated entire regions of southern Italy's olive trees.

Speaker 45 Specifically, what we're talking about is the southern region of Apulia, the Salento area. So this is at the very tip of the heel of the boot, let's say.

Speaker 45 So, you have areas where you really have no live olive trees anymore.

Speaker 6 That's Rodrigo Almeida.

Speaker 34 He's a professor of environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, and he studies this terrible olive plague.

Speaker 5 He says millions of Italian olive trees have died.

Speaker 45 At some point in the past, this bacterium that's called xylala fastidiosa was introduced into the region.

Speaker 1 This xylella bacteria colonizes the part of the plant called the xylem network. It's basically the plumbing system for water flow inside the olive tree.

Speaker 45 Essentially, as the bacteria moves and colonizes the plant, it clogs up water flow and the plants are essentially thirsty.

Speaker 1 So the trees die of thirst.

Speaker 11 The xylella bacteria is transmitted from tree to tree by insects while they're feeding on the water and nutrients that circulate around in the tree.

Speaker 11 And Rodrigo says that if a mature olive tree gets infected, it can go from healthy to dead in a couple of years.

Speaker 1 Like Rodrigo says, xylella was introduced to Italy. It's not from there originally.
Scientists first detected it in 2013, but Rodrigo thinks it got to Italy a couple of decades earlier.

Speaker 45 So this is another point that's somewhat controversial, but today with the data that we have available, all the data indicate that it originated from Central America.

Speaker 20 In fact, xylella is widespread in Central America and South America, where it infects coffee plants and citrus.

Speaker 11 In Brazil, it got to a point where something like 6 million citrus trees were getting infected and destroyed each year.

Speaker 9 In North America, in California, xylella infects grapevines.

Speaker 1 There are grapevines in southern Italy, too, but they haven't been destroyed by xylella. And Catherine and Robin's olives in California so far are safe.
Why is that?

Speaker 1 Well, it turns out that different strains of xylella attack different plants. So far, scientists aren't seeing a lot of, oh, the grapevine xylella just jumped to the olive tree.

Speaker 1 But that's not 100% fail-safe because the xylella from Central America that came to Italy didn't start out on an olive tree. So it's complicated, but it's dangerous.

Speaker 32 Xylella is a pretty common plant disease, and like most plant diseases, you have some tools to stop it from spreading.

Speaker 39 The main one is quarantine.

Speaker 5 This is where growers cut down infected trees, but also all the other nearby trees that might also have been exposed, even if they aren't showing symptoms yet. It's a better safe than sorry approach.

Speaker 1 The authorities in Italy and the EU called for just this approach, cut down infected trees and the trees surrounding them to be safe.

Speaker 1 But southern Italians were unwilling to chop down their beloved trees.

Speaker 8 These olive groves go back centuries.

Speaker 28 They define the landscape, the culture, the food, everything.

Speaker 20 So that was one problem.

Speaker 1 Another challenge was the fact that there was a big social media campaign to undermine the science.

Speaker 45 You have a very challenging situation at the moment, for example, where you had scientists working on the epidemic being investigated by a local prosecutor, possibly being charged for being responsible for the epidemic.

Speaker 45 You have people who do not believe in science. For example, they don't believe that Xylala fasciosa is a bacterium.
They don't believe that it's present there. They think it's a hoax.

Speaker 45 They think that the mafia is behind it. There are several different conspiracy theories.

Speaker 45 And this sort of narrative permeated through the local population, or at least sections of the local population, and you ended up with a situation where politicians were not willing to do what was supposed to be done and make difficult decisions.

Speaker 45 And as a consequence, the epidemic has spread.

Speaker 1 Xylella has since been found in Spain and France, too. Honestly, this all makes me a little panicky.
I think a full third of my diet must be made up of olive oil. How worried should I really be?

Speaker 45 I think people are right to be anxious. You know, it's not the end of olive oil production in Europe.

Speaker 45 It's clear that in specific circumstances, like in southern Italy, if the conditions are just right, you can have a devastating epidemic.

Speaker 5 Scientists are working to breed xylella-resistant olive tree varieties.

Speaker 20 They're figuring out new ways to control the insects that spread the xylella.

Speaker 9 And the EU has cracked down on Italy to make sure people do enforce the quarantine.

Speaker 45 My understanding is that there has been a little bit of a shift here where the local government is complying with the recommendations a little bit more.

Speaker 1 All my digits are crossed. I can't imagine Italy without olive oil or my life without all the olive oil possible.
You and me both.

Speaker 21 But, Cynthia, we've been talking about olives for a few minutes now, and we have yet to even get into what olive oil is.

Speaker 39 And I know this sounds like a stupid thing to ask.

Speaker 5 Like, of course we know what olive oil is.

Speaker 21 It's oil from an olive.

Speaker 1 But we figured we should ask the expert, that's author Tom Mueller, we should ask him what it is, just to be sure. That's coming up after the break.

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Speaker 36 An olive is a droop, technically speaking, a seed fruit like a plum or a cherry. And so olive oil, or what you extract from the olive, is quite literally fruit juice.

Speaker 1 That is not the answer we were expecting.

Speaker 11 But why would the juice of a fruit be so oily?

Speaker 39 Plum juice is not oily.

Speaker 8 Cherry juice is not oily.

Speaker 1 Tom says it's all because of what the olive seed needs to grow.

Speaker 36 It is a nectar that produces magnificent compost, ideal compost for the olive seed, especially when added to a dab of bird droppings.

Speaker 36 And since then, it's become the ideal nectar for the classical world in terms of bodily beautification, skin, skin, health, food, obviously, fuel for lamps and furnaces, lubricant for machines, softener for fabrics, and we're talking the Greco-Roman world, but also well before.

Speaker 20 Tom told us that the olive was likely first domesticated around 4000 BC in the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaker 36 And by about 1000 to 1500 BC,

Speaker 36 it was industrial. And there are huge presses found in Ekron in Israel with huge logs for lever arms that could produce something along the order of a million liters a year.

Speaker 1 The people who lived around the Mediterranean used olive oil for food, of course, but as Tom said, that's not all.

Speaker 1 By the time of the Greek and Roman empires, olive oil was thoroughly integrated into all areas of life.

Speaker 11 First of all, Tom says olive oil was the greatest renewable energy source in antiquity.

Speaker 13 It burnt super hot and it contained two times the energy of carbon.

Speaker 4 But people weren't just burning it, they weren't even just eating it.

Speaker 2 They were, in fact, rubbing it all over their bodies.

Speaker 36 I mean, the idea of having doing sports or bathing in the classical civilized manner was unthinkable without olive oil and its various extracts.

Speaker 36 You know, olive oil is also used in the home as soap and as a base for perfumes and to be used against hair loss and stomach aches and as a religious offering.

Speaker 36 And little vials of olive oil are found in various shrines around the Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 Olive oil was such a great base for perfume because it kind of melts into the skin and leaves this lovely shine. It's not dry like the alcohol-based perfumes you can buy today.

Speaker 1 And of course, it contributes its own olive-y scent to the mix. I use olive oil as an olive oil moisturizer, and my partner Tim says it leaves a delicate scent of dinner.

Speaker 37 Cynthia, you and Tim are not the first to have noticed olive oil's miraculous beautifying powers.

Speaker 5 After Odysseus got shipwrecked in the Odyssey, he slathers himself in olive oil, and poof, suddenly he's as handsome as a god.

Speaker 1 The prophet Muhammad was said to have used so much olive oil on his body that even his shawl was drenched in it.

Speaker 10 But like I said, people weren't just rubbing themselves in olive oil in the ancient world.

Speaker 22 They burned it for light.

Speaker 48 They used it for frying.

Speaker 36 As a preservative, which is still very popular today, under oil. You know, your tuna under oil keeps better.
As a contraceptive, I'm not sure how that went, but it was, you know, major, major part.

Speaker 36 And as an aphrodisiac, again, I can't vouch for the

Speaker 36 for the active ingredient, but it was certainly mentioned by Greco-Roman writers.

Speaker 1 In the ancient world, olive oil was as valuable as petroleum, rock oil, is today. There were wars fought over it.

Speaker 36 Huge fortunes were amassed with olive oil.

Speaker 36 Emperors like Trajan and Hadrian were the scions of these flourishing olive oil dynasties in Spain and North Africa, a bit like sheikhs in the Middle East today with petroleum.

Speaker 36 So it was an empire builder and a source of enormous wealth, as well as the definition, one of the definitions of culture.

Speaker 36 And also, again, the Romans in their militaristic way, when the Roman legions would go to far-flung lands, they would plant vines and they would try to plant some olive trees.

Speaker 36 And if it didn't work out, they would certainly have a lot of imports of olive oil. Because to be the master race in their sense, you really had to do civilized things, and that involved olive oil.

Speaker 25 Olive oil has always been popular in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 2 Other cultures had other fats, such butter, coconut oil, sesame oil, ghee, lard, etc.

Speaker 32 But then, just a few decades ago, a doctor called Ansel Keys, who we've talked about on this podcast before.

Speaker 1 He starred in our butter episode as the man who villainized our favorite spread.

Speaker 5 He did a big study looking at what made the difference between countries where people had more heart attacks versus countries where people had fewer.

Speaker 20 And his findings became popularized as the Mediterranean diet.

Speaker 5 Keyes published a book on the Mediterranean diet in 1980, extolling the virtues of olive oil and lots of vegetables as a way to avoid heart heart disease.

Speaker 1 This dietary advice took a while to catch on, but by the 90s, olive oil had started to become super popular throughout the world, not just in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 One quick note: there are lots of flaws with Keyes research, and other fats are not necessarily evil. That said, olive oil is high in antioxidants and it's delicious.

Speaker 5 It is delicious, but here's the thing: we tasted a ripe olive straight off the tree in Catherine and Robins Grove, and it was rank.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, it's disgusting.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 It's like bitter and like astringent.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like very drying.

Speaker 16 Like your entire mouth is dried out and then some for a while.

Speaker 2 Wow, it's really gross.

Speaker 16 Can you imagine the people who are like, this tastes disgusting?

Speaker 1 Let's put it in salt and see what happens and maybe it's gonna be delicious. Salt? Because that's how you cure an olive and invent table olives for snacking.

Speaker 16 You just can't, I just have no idea how anybody. I always have these like fascinations.
Like, how did anybody decide that coffee could be, coffee beans could be turned into coffee?

Speaker 16 Same with olives.

Speaker 16 I have no idea I mean they taste not good off of there but it's there is something that happens in the mill and it's all a little bit mysterious to me still because I'm not I'm not like a chemist or a biologist, but there's enzymatic reactions that happen in the crushing process that release those aromas.

Speaker 16 That's why you don't taste, they don't taste good off the tree, but with some enzyme action that happens in the mill with a little bit of, you know, crushing and agitation, I don't know, it becomes perfume.

Speaker 1 Nikki, you got a chance not just to pick olives and get clay in your hair, but to see Catherine and Robin milling their olives for the very first time. I'm jealous.
You should be jealous.

Speaker 41 It was awesome.

Speaker 20 Although we had to leave while everyone else was drinking post-harvest beers and race down the peninsula to the nearest olive mill that was small enough to process our tiny harvest.

Speaker 13 The team at the mill dumped the olives into a giant bin, and then Catherine hit the magic button.

Speaker 19 The olives started moving up a conveyor belt and then they fell into a bubble bath.

Speaker 40 There they go.

Speaker 17 The olives are getting cleaned up with a little water.

Speaker 19 And then they got pulled up into the crusher and that's where things started smelling good.

Speaker 17 We've got ground up olives here in what we call the malaxer.

Speaker 17 It's kind of like you can imagine a KitchenAid mixer where you're mixing it up and this malaxation process allows the cell walls of the olive to break down and the microscopic droplets of oil to coalesce together and that's what the malaxer is for.

Speaker 19 But it smells so freaking amazing.

Speaker 19 smell it right you can smell the olives yeah it's one of my favorite smells in the world the crushed up olives had to stay in the malaxer until jeff the guy who runs the mill started seeing oil you see the shininess for those of you on radio it's shiny at this point the paste gets pumped into the decanter which is a centrifuge that separates the olive skin and flesh from the oil and water and then the final step the oil and water the olive juice that goes into another centrifuge that separates them and spits out a stream of water and a stream of oil.

Speaker 1 Catherine and Robin are currently bottling up their oil. We have details on how you can get it at gastropod.com.

Speaker 1 And if you want to hear what Catherine thought of her very first taste of her very first oil, listen all the way through the credits.

Speaker 14 Turns out that our crew of a dozen complete novices picked over a thousand pounds of olives from 32 trees that day, which made 15 gallons of oil or more than 100 bottles worth.

Speaker 41 And I slept like a baby that night.

Speaker 1 At this point, most people would mix their oils into blends. Catherine actually plans to keep her different oil varieties separate from one another, single-varietal olive oils.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the ways you can really taste the difference among different oils based on the olive variety. We did a tasting of Anna's oils in Tuscany.

Speaker 38 Sit down, relax, and

Speaker 38 I'm going to serve you

Speaker 38 two different varieties.

Speaker 38 Don't smile because you feel

Speaker 38 the radio dish.

Speaker 38 But to

Speaker 38 taste oil, you have to keep the oil in your mouth and take in air through the teeth.

Speaker 41 That sound?

Speaker 21 That sound has a name.

Speaker 27 I'm going to let Tom say it because my Italian is terrible.

Speaker 36 Stripaggio, or stripping. It's slurping, essentially.
You slurp, drawing in air in the corners of your mouth, which aerosolizes the oil and makes the aromas go back into your nasal passages.

Speaker 36 And it allows you to, I mean, it's amazing. If you put olive oil in your mouth and you taste it and you swallow it,

Speaker 36 and then you do it again, the same oil, and you do this slurping, which sounds something like this.

Speaker 1 Then you can really get a sense of all the different aromatics and flavors in the oil. It sounds weird, literally, and it feels weird, but it works.

Speaker 38 Hello.

Speaker 38 It's 2016, as I told you, was a warm climax. The flower, it's not so intensive,

Speaker 38 but the

Speaker 38 so I smell, of course, I smell olives. I smell

Speaker 38 the leaves.

Speaker 1 So, of course, we gave it a try, too.

Speaker 1 Don't joke on it.

Speaker 6 I tell you before I can.

Speaker 38 Careful there. And so so what it means.

Speaker 1 It has like a pepper,

Speaker 1 not the like sear the back of your throat, but like a peppery vegetable. I mean, it's really strong.
I love it.

Speaker 15 Yeah, very peppery.

Speaker 7 How was our technique?

Speaker 38 No, but you see, when you start to...

Speaker 38 Yeah. It means that the technique works.

Speaker 1 So the fact that you were joking was a good thing.

Speaker 7 It's a good thing.

Speaker 1 The joking response doesn't just mean that you're tasting it correctly. Another reason you might be coughing is because of that peppery note, which is also good.

Speaker 1 The more peppery the olive oil is, the more polyphenols it has. Those peppery polyphenols are what many scientists think are awesome for your health.

Speaker 40 Anna's oil was delicious, unsurprisingly, and very peppery, as you heard.

Speaker 28 We joked.

Speaker 10 But then she gave us the final sample.

Speaker 7 Her own oil, but so old it had gone rancid.

Speaker 1 I'm afraid to drink this.

Speaker 2 Do we have to?

Speaker 1 Oh, no. Just as expected, it tasted disgusting, old, stale, musty.
I had to immediately take a taste of her fresh oil to clean my mouth of the flavor.

Speaker 38 Honestly,

Speaker 38 I make this oil because when we have a tasting, I have to show them

Speaker 38 because it's happened that when I give them my rancid oil, that was the old oil, they say that was good.

Speaker 20 This is what originally inspired Catherine to get in the olive oil game herself.

Speaker 15 A professor made her taste some rancid olive oil as part of an international food studies class.

Speaker 16 And he poured us all a little tasting cup full of olive oil. And he said, tell me what you think of this olive oil.
So we all tasted it.

Speaker 16 And all of the Americans were like, yep, that tastes like olive oil. And he's like, great, that's rancid.

Speaker 16 And I was like, what? I've been eating rancid olive oil my whole life and I didn't even know it. Like, Foodie Extraordinaire did not, like, knows nothing about olive oil clearly.

Speaker 16 So really what emerged from that experience was consumer rage.

Speaker 1 Anna and Catherine's point is, many Americans and Northern Europeans kind of like rancid oil because that's what we think olive oil is supposed to taste like.

Speaker 1 Because a lot of the oil that's sold as lovely extra virgin olive oil, it's not.

Speaker 36 Olive oil fraud is enormously widespread today. And there are two different kinds, like in politics or in finance.
There's the illegal fraud.

Speaker 36 You know, the favorite way of doing fraud is simply to sell something which isn't extra virgin as extra virgin and pocket the differential.

Speaker 36 You know, you can get away with putting really bad olive oil from olives into a bottle of extra virgin, sometimes mixed with extra virgin to give it a little more pizzazz and sometimes just sold as is.

Speaker 29 Bad olive oil is called lampante, officially speaking, meaning it's only fit for use for lighting a lamp.

Speaker 9 Lampante oil will typically be made from olives that have fallen from the tree rather than being freshly picked.

Speaker 20 They might have already fermented, which fermentation is often associated with great flavors, but definitely not in the case of olive oil.

Speaker 1 To make this bad oil remotely palatable, the fakers do something called deodorization. They clean the oil of the nasty overtones by heating it to about 40 to 60 degrees Celsius.

Speaker 1 It's tasteless at this point, but deodorization also removes any of the healthful compounds. You're left with just the fat.

Speaker 36 You can also mix it with even cheaper vegetable oils, you know, soybean, sunflower, and so on. So that's the illegal fraud.
That's fraud fraud.

Speaker 36 Then there's legal fraud, where you have a label which says the ancient millstones or

Speaker 36 some Italian-sounding name which has absolutely nothing to do with Italy.

Speaker 36 The olives were grown somewhere in southern Spain or North Africa and then

Speaker 36 sold as fake Italian.

Speaker 2 For a lot more money.

Speaker 14 Then there's a product called Extra Light Olive Oil.

Speaker 4 That's actually illegal in Europe, but you can buy it in the States.

Speaker 5 It sounds like low-calorie olive oil, right?

Speaker 36 But guess what? It's the same 120 calories per tablespoon as all the other. It just doesn't have any flavor and it doesn't have any color

Speaker 36 because it has been processed in a refiner. It's been refined.
It sounds so good, except that it just means devoid of good stuff. And it's, you know, it's an open swindle.

Speaker 36 So those are the legal frauds.

Speaker 1 Not only is this extra light olive oil fraudulent, but it's tasteless and once again, not good for you.

Speaker 1 By making it extra light, the companies, first of all, are probably using crap oil to start with. And then, like Tom says, they're removing any of the beneficial compounds.

Speaker 1 So how can you make sure you're not being cheated? That's coming up after the break.

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Speaker 42 So, how common is olive oil fraud, both the fraud fraud and the legal fraud?

Speaker 37 The truth is, it's hard to know.

Speaker 20 Unsurprisingly, most of it goes undetected.

Speaker 10 In 2010, UC Davis did a survey of 14 different brands of imported extra virgin olive oils on California supermarket shelves, and they found that more than two-thirds of them were actually not extra-virgin quality at all.

Speaker 1 In February of this year, Italian authorities arrested 33 suspects from a Calabrian mafia clan. They were, among other things, allegedly exporting fake extra-virgin olive oil.

Speaker 1 They were importing super low-grade crap oil, cleaning it with chemical solvents, and labeling it as extra-virgin, and exporting it to the U.S. There's a lot of money to be made in this.

Speaker 1 High-quality olive oil can sell for $50 a gallon, while the fake stuff costs only $7 to make. Tom Mueller told us that the profit margin can be higher than selling cocaine.

Speaker 42 Olive oil fraud is not a new problem.

Speaker 12 As we discussed in our episode on food fraud last spring, people have been faking food as long as they've been buying and selling it.

Speaker 36 You know, the oldest mention of olive oil in writing is on cuneiform tablets from the 24th century BC in the kingdom of Ebla.

Speaker 36 And those tablets mention the king's olive oil investigators going around to the mills to make sure those olive oil millers weren't getting up to their usual tricks.

Speaker 36 So you already have an oil fraud squad. So clearly this is an ancient problem.

Speaker 1 Tom loves telling the story of Monte Testaccio in Rome. It's a hill of pot shirts left over from the Roman Empire and there are fragments of writing on those pieces of terracotta.

Speaker 36 And if you piece those together you will see that the writing outside the amphora that were used to import olive oil to Rome mention.

Speaker 36 who grew the olives, where those olives were milled in Spain, North Africa, wherever it was, how much it weighed when it was put on the ship, how much it weighed when it was taken off the ship at the port of Rome.

Speaker 10 The Romans didn't just do this for fun.

Speaker 14 And it wasn't just bureaucratic OCD either.

Speaker 36 They did it because there was an enormous fraud problem. And the way to stop the fraud is to keep very careful.

Speaker 36 tabs on who's doing what and how much stuff weighs, where it's coming from, what the names of the people are.

Speaker 36 So that if there is a problem, if you open an amphora and you say, ah, God, this smells funny. Who made this?

Speaker 36 You can go back up the supply chain, find the person, and probably in Roman times, cut both their feet off and ask them not to do it again.

Speaker 5 Nowadays, olive oil fraudsters that are caught tend to get huge fines or jail sentences instead.

Speaker 11 But you get the picture.

Speaker 1 So, we've told you that a lot of what is sold as extra virgin is not actually extra virgin. But back to a question we posed earlier in the episode: what the hell is extra virgin?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 36 So, this virgin oil is olive oil produced by mechanical means,

Speaker 36 i.e., grinding and pressing or spinning out the oil.

Speaker 39 So that's virgin oil.

Speaker 31 And then there are three grades of virgin oils, extra virgin, virgin, and lamponte.

Speaker 11 So even the stuff that is unfit for human consumption, that is only supposed to be used for fuel, that is still virgin.

Speaker 36 Extra virgin is the highest quality grade of virgin oil. So that's virgin virgin.
That's why I chose the title extra virginity because it's such a complete joke.

Speaker 36 I mean, the title itself tells you what a joke it is. It's like extra dead or semi-pregnant.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Speaker 1 But there are a number of hoops olive oil has to jump through to be legally called extra virgin. First of all, it has to pass a number of chemical tests.

Speaker 1 Listener Brenda Vest is the one who wanted us to do this episode.

Speaker 9 And Brenda's job is to perform these chemical tests on the olive oil that her company imports.

Speaker 12 She has a lab near the port of Baltimore, and we gave her a quick call to find out how she does what she does.

Speaker 33 Let's say that a container comes in. So So there's a 6,000-gallon flexby bag that arrives at our facility.

Speaker 33 So it's the initial quick testing that takes about 15 minutes where we test free fatty acid content, peroxide content. And these are two quick citrations that we do in-house.

Speaker 1 Brenda is checking to make sure that the imported olive oil is not cut with seed oil or cheaper pumice oil. They check to make sure that it hasn't been exposed to too much heat and light.

Speaker 1 This breaks down the oil into other chemicals that Brenda can test for.

Speaker 33 So yeah, overall the process can take from 15 minutes to three days.

Speaker 42 So far so good, right?

Speaker 30 Except not, because A, Tom told us that the FDA doesn't actually require any testing on imported olive oil.

Speaker 11 So while Brenda's company is going above and beyond, lots of other suppliers aren't.

Speaker 1 And B, this is going to be even more disappointing to hear, these tests are just not enough on their own.

Speaker 36 Oil that just passes the chemical tests,

Speaker 36 you wouldn't touch with a barge pole. You wouldn't get it near your mouth.
But it's still technically air diversion.

Speaker 27 But wait, all is not lost.

Speaker 10 To be labeled extra virgin, olive oil shouldn't just pass the chemical tests.

Speaker 24 There's another, more challenging hurdle.

Speaker 36 It should be able to pass a taste test or a sensory test where 17 specifically defined, legally defined flaws can be identified.

Speaker 16 So I have been trained now to identify all of the flavor defects and flaws that can arise in olive oil, including rancidity, I'm proud to say.

Speaker 41 That's right.

Speaker 25 The Catherine who tasted rancid olive oil and loved it is no more.

Speaker 27 The Catherine of Today serves on California Olive Oil's Tasting Council.

Speaker 14 It's a third-party group that certifies all California-based olive oil.

Speaker 1 Every California producer sends their oil to the California Olive Oil Tasting Council.

Speaker 1 First it has to pass the chemical analysis, low acidity, specific peroxide values, all the types of tests that Brenda does. But then it's time for the tasting.

Speaker 16 And we blind taste it. We taste it in these little blue glasses so we can't see the color because color is not an indicator of quality.

Speaker 16 And we smell it and we taste it and we are trained to taste for very specific flaws that can appear in olive oil. Rancidity is one.
Fustiness is another, which is actually a form of fermentation.

Speaker 16 Wininess or vinegariness is another one that's also a form of fermentation. Grubby is another one.

Speaker 27 Grubby in this case doesn't mean dirty. It means there were too many bugs in the olives, like that pesky olive fly.

Speaker 16 And there's a few others that we're trained to detect. And so if the producer's oil passed both the chemical analysis and the sensory evaluation, they get a seal that says their oil is extra virgin.

Speaker 36 A skilled taste panel is an unbelievably sensitive quality judge. And you can game the chemistry, but you can't game the sensory panel if they're well trained.

Speaker 36 It's just that there aren't very many of those.

Speaker 27 So at this point, you might be thinking, well, crap.

Speaker 29 How am I supposed to know if the olive oil on my kitchen counter is really extra virgin?

Speaker 31 I'm not trained like Catherine, but I want to make sure I'm getting the good stuff.

Speaker 1 Don't worry, we're not going to leave you on a depressing note. There are a number of things you can do to make sure you're buying real extra virgin olive oil.

Speaker 1 The first is to look for some kind of third-party verification.

Speaker 25 California is ahead of the game here because of its third-party testing.

Speaker 5 Australia is too.

Speaker 16 If you're in California, look for the California Olive Oil Council seal. If you're buying oils from somewhere else, look for some third-party seal.

Speaker 16 A DOP or an AOC kind of certification from Europe is a great indicator.

Speaker 1 In fact, if I have to grab olive oil quickly at the store, I'll look for California olive oil and the California olive oil certification seal. It's a good shortcut guarantee of quality.

Speaker 29 But that's not to say that you can't buy amazing imported oil too.

Speaker 24 You just have to do some homework.

Speaker 11 Like Catherine says, look for an AOC or DOP seal.

Speaker 20 Tom recommends using Google Maps to see if there are actually any olive trees at the location where the olive oil says it was made.

Speaker 1 Or you can buy from someone you trust. I usually get my oil from a store that imports bulk olive oil directly from a farm in Italy.

Speaker 1 That said, I wouldn't buy just any oil at a random grocery store where the label says it's Italian. That is the most likely to be fraudulent.

Speaker 27 One reliable tell that you're dealing with decent oil is that the bottle will have a harvest date on it because good olive oil producers know that freshness is king.

Speaker 16 If you don't see a harvest date on the bottle, I would recommend not buying that because the producer's obviously not proud enough to put the harvest date on the bottle.

Speaker 1 You want to find one that's been harvested probably no more than around a year ago. The olive oil is not getting any better as it ages.
Remember, it's fruit juice.

Speaker 14 And that leads us to our next recommendation, which all our experts share.

Speaker 40 If you buy good olive oil, use it up quickly.

Speaker 14 Literally, the chemical defects that Brenda is testing for are what is happening to your oil as it sits on your counter getting old.

Speaker 36 It breaks my heart. I don't give olive oil as gifts anymore because...

Speaker 36 So many times I've given a gift of olive oil, a really good bottle of olive oil. I'd say, here, this is the real stuff.
And they say, oh, wow, fantastic. That's great and i go

Speaker 36 to their house a year later and it's still there collecting dust and i say so what's the store here and they say well we're waiting for a special occasion

Speaker 36 and it's uh it's heartbreaking because this is not a special occasion food this is i mean this is everyday food and even if it's very expensive, it's something that you use on a daily basis and should be in the middle of the table.

Speaker 1 Now you know how to buy oil and you know how quickly you need to use it. You have great olive oil on your shelf.
Time for something fun. Enjoying it.

Speaker 10 The cool thing is that extra virgin olive oil that passes the sensory panel can still taste wildly different based on where the olives were grown, the climate and time of year, the type of olive, and how they were processed.

Speaker 36 You can get fresh cut grass, you can get tomato leaf, you can get green almond, nuttiness, even kiwi flavors.

Speaker 1 Anna told us a story about an olive oil from Sicily that had an incredible scent of tomatoes. It wasn't infused with tomatoes.
It just literally smelled like tomatoes.

Speaker 1 So she decided to use it to play a trick on her kids.

Speaker 38 I give them two pieces of pizza and I tell them which one you like more. One with our Tuscany blend and one with this variety from Secilia that smell tomato.

Speaker 38 And they say, Mama, the tomato are much better of this pizza. It's exactly the same.

Speaker 1 The kids thought that one piece of pizza tasted better because it had more tomatoey tomatoes, but the tomatoes were the same. It was just the oil that was different.

Speaker 20 And this is where you get to have fun with your olive oil.

Speaker 11 Mixing up the pairings.

Speaker 25 A softer Ligurian oil is often better with fish.

Speaker 10 A peppery Tuscan oil stands up to beans.

Speaker 30 Those are geographical differences, but you can also find single-variety olive oils.

Speaker 27 So, an olive oil made only from frantoyo olives, for example, or arbaikina.

Speaker 25 And those bring different flavors to the olive oil party, too.

Speaker 1 If you have different oils that you want to try side by side to really appreciate the differences, Tom has a simple recommendation, mashed potatoes.

Speaker 36 Take mashed potatoes and have three different, really different olive oils and try one of each.

Speaker 36 Just mashed potatoes and put, while it's still steaming, the really good olive oil on there and make a little reservoir in the middle and fill it with olive oil and put your face over it before you eat it and smell.

Speaker 36 I mean, it's quite, it begins to be, you know, wine tasting without the posing. and the terminology because you really smell it.
You put your snout over it and you smell it and it really is special.

Speaker 27 Special, but maybe not as instantly compelling as Catherine's recommendation.

Speaker 16 You can make a chocolate cake, an olive oil chocolate cake. You could drizzle chocolate ice cream with olive oil and a couple grains of sea salt is lovely.

Speaker 16 I just find chocolate and a really robust olive oil just pushes all my buttons.

Speaker 1 Warning, if you are hungry right now, we are not done listing insanely delicious ways to consume olive oil.

Speaker 36 You know, start off with vegetables. Start off with whatever vegetables you like and put some on there and then put it down and then put some more on there.
I mean, put a lot on there.

Speaker 36 It has to be dripping with olive oil. And I challenge people not to find it vastly better.

Speaker 3 This has been the Italian trick to make vegetables delicious for centuries.

Speaker 36 Some English travelers in Florence in the late 16th century marveled at the amount of vegetables these Tuscans ate.

Speaker 36 And they said, you know, really, they can only choke it down by putting this olive oil on it. That's the only way that I can understand

Speaker 36 their ability to eat so many vegetables.

Speaker 1 I happen to love vegetables and don't have to choke them down, but I agree that they taste even better with a really healthy glug of olive oil poured on them right before you eat them.

Speaker 1 This is what Catherine and Tom are telling you to do. It's something that's not super common in America.
Pour olive oil on after you're done cooking. Use it on vegetables, drizzle it on your soups.

Speaker 1 It can make food sparkle.

Speaker 10 But none of these delicious serving suggestions is what Catherine and Robin said when we asked them how they were going to enjoy their very first oil.

Speaker 2 I know what your answer would be. What's my answer?

Speaker 16 Just give them a loaf of bread. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like little pita breads.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I got toast them up, dip them. I'm a big dipper.
Big olive oil dipper.

Speaker 16 I love

Speaker 16 a super simple pot of beans. Super plain, not spiced up any, just simple with fresh,

Speaker 16 maybe our first crush. I want the pot of beans drizzled with a lot of freshly made olive oil.

Speaker 1 Thanks so much to Ana Casaday in Tuscany and to Tony Mazzalia, who introduced us to her. Take Tony's food tours, tasteflorence.com.

Speaker 10 Thanks also to Catherine Tomagen and Robin Sloan.

Speaker 14 You can find out more about their first harvest and how to get hold of it at gastropod.com, where we have links to all the books and papers and olive groves we mentioned this episode.

Speaker 27 Not to mention video of the vibrating rakes.

Speaker 1 Thanks to Tom Mueller, author of Extra Virginity, and Rodrigo Almeida at UC Berkeley.

Speaker 3 And a huge thanks to listener Brenda Vest.

Speaker 4 We love our listeners and we love your suggestions and we love it even more when you take part in our share-a-thon.

Speaker 15 Gastropod.com/slash share.

Speaker 11 It's only running through the end of the year, so get in there now.

Speaker 1 We promised you one last moment from our visit to Catherine and Robbins Olive Grove, their first taste of their first oil.

Speaker 16 What are you thinking? Mmm.

Speaker 17 Oh, yeah, it's quite robust because it's so fresh. So I'm getting really nice bitterness and pungency.

Speaker 41 And some,

Speaker 17 it's quite grassy, but

Speaker 17 also kind of

Speaker 17 a few other descriptors I might use is like a green almond, which is a really particular descriptor for olive oil, which is really nice.

Speaker 16 I don't know what else. It's just, it's good.

Speaker 19 I'm really happy with it.

Speaker 17 We will put this in a bottle and love it.

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