There are few food terms as unimpeachable as “extra virgin.” The label, as applied to olive oil, stands for purity, for goodness, for healthfulness, even – for a natural product so fresh and so guileless that it’s not merely virginal, but doubly so. Or that’s what you’d think.
In the summer of 2007, Tom Mueller, an American journalist living in Italy, published an article in The New Yorker that showed how the world’s most ubiquitous luxury food didn’t only fail to meet the “extra virgin” standard, but in many cases wasn’t made from olives at all. Rogue chemists had learned to disguise tanker ships full of low-grade soybean oil and even lamp fuel so that it could pass for the highest grade of olive oil, Mr. Mueller revealed. Even such multinationals as Unilever, Nestlé and Bertolli sold “extra virgin” olive oil that was anything but.
Mr. Mueller’s follow-up, called Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, was released this week. The book is part history (olive oil fraud goes back at least as far as the ancient Romans, although they had stronger regulations than exist today), part indictment (much of the framework surrounding Italy’s olive oil industry makes it nearly impossible for quality producers to compete) and part travelogue (Australia and California have begun producing some of the world’s best oils). Thankfully, it’s also a consumer guide of sorts, a handbook to buying great oil without getting ripped off – something that is surprisingly easier in Canada, Mr. Mueller says, than most other places on earth. The Globe and Mail reached him at his home in Genoa, Italy, this week.
It’s feels like on every 10th page of the book you’re taking a swig of olive oil – chugging it straight out of the bottle or slugging it out of a shot glass. Is the stuff you’re trying in Italy that much better than what we can get over here?
The short answer is yes. Part of it is thinking of olive oil as a fresh-squeezed fruit juice. It’s fresh produce: You squish the olive, you extract the juice and you use it quickly. This is fundamentally different from the average North American view of olive oil, where it’s just another long-shelf-life industrial fat that’s dumped into the bottom of a frying pan. It does seem a bit odd at first to sip olive oil, and it’s not the most natural way to use it. But it’s very good if it’s fresh: It’s got a lot of character.
You write that the best-before dates on olive oil are typically two years from bottling, but that mass-market oil will often sit around in storage before the clock even starts ticking. What does “fresh” mean to you?
Every day that goes by, olive oil decomposes. It loses not only its flavour characteristics, but also its healthful properties. Certain oils hold up better than others, just like certain wines age better than others. But basically you should try to eat it within the same 12-month period that it was picked and pressed. And you need a harvest date on the bottle to know when that is.
Should we be concerned about the quality of extra virgin oil at the grocery store?
It’s expensive to make really good olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil on the commodities market in Europe now, you can get it for 1.85 euros per litre. You cannot make real extra virgin olive oil for anything close to that price. And a producer of quality oil cannot begin to compete against that if consumers don’t know the difference. And yet if you walk into a store, you’re faced with a wall of labels, and they all say basically the same thing.
