The Myth of Italian Olive Oil

When most Americans think of olive oil, they think of Italian olive oil. While Italian olive oil certainly can be superior, this automatic thought link has more to do with marketing and exposure than quality. Italy doesn't grow enough olives to support their own consumption, and the worldwide olive oil industry is highly unregulated. Most 'Italian' olive oils available in American groceries are actually only bottled in Italy - they are grown and processed in Spain, Portugal, Greece and some Middle East countries. After processing, the oil is transported to Italy, where it is blended with other imported oils, bottled under an Italian label and exported to the US. All this travel and processing takes time and leaves the oil aging, losing flavor as it bumps slowly along the transport chain. One Italian woman told me that to get good oil in Italy, you must know someone with trees.

I didn't know any of this when I was reading Frances Mayes' memoir Under the Tuscan Sun. She is poetic in her description of Bramasole's own olive oil and its many culinary uses, and I was left bemused. While her writing was stunning in its beauty, my experiences with olive oil had left me less than impressed. Her description of the bright and distinct flavor was in direct opposition to my experience, a tasteless, oily coating on my tongue which left me scrubbing surreptitiously with a piece of plain bread. I wondered if the taste buds required to enjoy olive oil were missing from my DNA.

Obviously, a quest for olive oil was not the reason I headed for Crete, though if I had been on such a quest, Crete certainly would have been a smart place to begin. When Ansel Key conducted his 15 year long 'Seven Country Study,' Crete was included, despite the fact that Crete is not a country. It's a Greek island in the Mediterranean. Cretans consume an incredible average of 25 kilos (22.5 liters) per year per person. That's just shy of 6 gallons per person. The result of Key's study was his recommendation to eat the now ubiquitous 'Mediterranean diet.' Greek olive oil is the rule on Crete though I did see Italian olive oil there - it was on the shelf of the American Navy's base grocery store. It was Bertolli, and it was the same color as corn oil. Everywhere else on Crete, the oil is green and Greek.

With so many people eating so much olive oil, I knew there must be something different about it from the olive oil I'd bought at my local grocery back in the States. As a favor, a local farmer took me along to the olive mill when his harvest was ready to be processed. My tour of the tiny mill didn't last long - the building was only slightly larger than a two car garage. We started at the cleaning station, where blowers sent the extraneous leaves and twigs shooting up a tube, leaving behind the heavier olives, which were then sent into a pool of water to remove more debris. From there, the olives were sent into modern temperature controlled vats where they were crushed and churned to encourage coagulation of the oil particles. After this, the paste was sent to a water cooled centrifuge and the oil was separated from the solid particles. Finally, the olive oil was pumped through a few filters and flowed from a tube into the farmer's container. The geriatric gentleman manning the final station tore off a slice of bread and held it under the yellow-green stream. He shook some salt on the oil soaked bread and silently offered it to me. When I bit into it, I was transported into Frances Mayes' Tuscan world, where olive oil tastes peppery, flowery, and green. Now I understood.

While all olive oil contains the heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, fresh oil contains more anti-oxidants. But more importantly, fresh oil, no matter where it comes from, tastes better. It's more enjoyable to eat, and since we now understand the myriad health benefits olive oil offers, eating more is better for us. On Crete, I tasted oils as old as 18 months which were still full of flavor, though they had lost a bit of their peppery edge. Those drab, tasteless, mass produced oils filling shelves across the States must be many years old to have lost so much of what they had in their youth.

My conclusion? With regard to olive oil, where is far less important than when. Whether your oil is Italian, Greek, Spanish, Australian, or Californian matters much less than how long it's been on the shelf, waiting for you.