Extra Virginity E-Book

Tom Mueller

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The best oils are made by authentic artist-craftsmen, who marry centuries-old agricultural wisdom with cutting-edge extraction technology, and now produce the finest oils in history. However, these producers are being steadily driven from the market: extra-virgin olive oil is difficult and expensive to make, yet alarmingly easy to adulterate. Skilled oil criminals are flooding the market with low-cost, faux extra-virgins, reaping rich profits and undercutting honest producers, whilst authorities in Italy, the US and elsewhere turn a blind eye. From the feisty pugliese woman of sixty struggling to keep the family business afloat to her industrialist neighbour who has allegedly grown wealthy on counterfeit oil, to Benedictine monks in Western Australia and poker-playing agriculture barons in northern California who make this ancient foodstuff in New World ways, Mueller distils the passions and life stories of oil producers, and explores the conflict, culinary vitality and cultural importance of great olive oil.

Leseprobe

EXTRA VIRGINITY

Tom Mueller lives in Liguria, Italy, with his wife and three children. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, he is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.

First published in the United States of America in 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc, New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Tom Mueller, 2012

The moral right of Tom Mueller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

“Grasse: The Olive Trees” from Ceremony and Other Poems copyright 1948 and renewed 1976 by Richard Wilbur, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. “The Peculiar Taste of Wild Olives” by William Oxley was first published in In the Drift of Words (Rockingham Press, 1992). Ritsos, Yannis; Yannis Ritsos, Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses. © 1991 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 006 2 eISBN: 978 1 78239 542 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books, An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd, Ormond House, 26–27 Boswell Street, London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Gino and Rosetta Olivieri

When a native of the Mediterranean had to leave the shores of the sea, he was uneasy and homesick; like the soldiers of Alexander the Great when he left Syria and advanced towards the Euphrates; or the sixteenth-century Spaniards in the Low Countries, miserable among the ‘fogs of the North’. For Alonzo Vázquez and the Spaniards of his time (and probably of all time) Flanders was ‘the land where there grows neither thyme, nor lavender, figs, olives, melons, or almonds; where dishes are prepared, strange to relate, with butter from cows instead of oil.’

—Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Preface

A few decades ago, to obtain one of their birthrights, Mediterraneans living in Britain had to troop to a pharmacy, where in an atmosphere redolent of rubbing alcohol, camphor and cough syrup, they would buy small brown bottles bearing the seal of the British Pharmacopoeia. These bottles contained olive oil, which to most self-respecting Britons was medicine, not part of a meal.

The Romans decamped from these shores 1600 years ago, taking their beloved olive oil and wine and leaving Britannia awash in barbarian butter, lard and beer. The resulting culinary-cultural divide between the Roman-dominated south of Europe and the barbarian northlands persisted to the present day. Southern Europeans, who at table continued to do much as the Romans had done, cherished olive oil and shunned butter as unhealthy, even unnatural. Members of the Gonzaga family, Renaissance lords of Mantua, brought ample supplies of “good oil” when they traveled to England, as did the Cardinal of Aragon on his voyage through the Low Countries in 1517: “Due to the butter and dairy produce that is so widely used in Flanders and Germany,” the cardinal observed warily, “these countries are overrun with lepers.” Most northern Europeans, for their part, prized olive oil for its medicinal properties and sacred symbolism—olive oil was, after all, the main ingredient of Christian holy oils—but disliked its bitterness and pungency, so unlike the sweet animal fats of their native comfort foods. Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess, mystic and poet-philosopher born on the Rhine, spoke for many when she stated that olive oil was fine physic but foul provender, which “causes nausea when eaten, and ruins other foods when cooked together with them”.

No wonder the saintly Hildegard took such a dim view of oil. From Roman times through to the late twentieth century, nearly all olive oil that arrived in Britain wasn’t something you’d want near your nose, much less in your mouth. Thomas Platter, a Swiss traveler of the sixteenth century, said that only low quality, second-pressed olive oil reached northern Europe—and an expression current in England in his time, “as brown as oil,” suggests he was right. In many cases, imported olive oil wasn’t just poor quality, but counterfeit. British consuls in Livorno reported that local oil merchants frequently topped up olive oil containers with cottonseed oil, and industrialists in the cloth trade complained that olive oil imported as a fabric softener was being adulterated with rapeseed oil, causing worm infestation in their wares. As recently as last year FOSFA, the storied organization based in London that facilitates international trade in oils and fats by writing contracts between buyers and sellers worldwide, wrote no contracts in olive oil because, it was rumored, the olive oil trade was too slippery.

IN THE LAST THIRTY years, however, the UK has started to discover olive oil. Though still sold at Boots in little brown bottles approved by the British Pharmacopoeia, olive oil is now a staple in many British households, and is widely available in supermarkets (Waitrose has the standout selection of estate oils, though Morrisons’ own-label oils can be good, too). As Italian, Greek and other olive oil-based cuisines have grown in popularity in the UK, and the Mediterranean diet has gained credence for its healthfulness, olive oil consumption has skyrocketed, increasing nearly eight-fold in the last two decades. There is an olive grove on the Isle of Oxney in Kent which, weather permitting, will yield its first oil next year, and in 2011, FOSFA finally began working in olive oil. The country boasts skilled olive oil sommeliers like Judy Ridgway, expert oil importers and consultants such as Charles Carey, oil aficionados and advocates like Michael North, even oil expats like Johnny Madge, whose olive oil bar near Rome and tours of the groves and mills of Sabina are becoming legendary. A few top chefs now speak of olive oils in the plural, understanding that there are 700 different types of olives, and thousands of different styles of oil—they’ve begun to explore a culinary continent as complex in many ways as wine.

Yet though encouraging, these developments are merely minor victories in a larger battle for British oil, part of a world war being waged between good olive oil and bad. Much “extra virgin” oil that Britons eat is actually another substance, of dubious virginity indeed. Massive quantities of this low-grade oil, the lipid equivalent of rot-gut, pour into the UK sporting jaunty labels with happy peasants and orotund Italianate phraseology, and the all-important, incantatory words “Extra Virgin” on prominent display. By EU law, extra virgin olive oil must be free of sensory defects, yet many supermarket oils teem with them—rancidity, mustiness, fustiness, worm, dirt, et cetera ad nauseam. Some of these ersatz extra virgins are actually lampante, or “lamp oil,” which legally cannot be sold as food, only as fuel. Others aren’t made from olives at all, but from cheaper vegetable oils: sunflower, soybean, rape. The distinction between real and fake extra virgin isn’t mere culinary coquetry, but connect with taste and with health: fresh, bright, aromatic extra virgin olive oils enhance and improve the flavor of foods, while rancid faux virgins taint it. Good olive oil is a cocktail of health-promoting microelements that make it the keystone of the Mediterranean diet; bad oil, seething with free radicals, peroxides and other nasties, can hurt you. Companies that sell bad oil behind good labels are swindling consumers out of the remarkable flavors and health benefits of good olive oil. They’re also driving many quality producers out of business, because their inferior product costs much less to make—and has a much lower price tag—than quality olive oil, though both sorts are labeled “extra virgin.”

THIS BOOK TELLS THE story of olive oil, and how this marvellous food got itself in such a pickle. It shows how oil has glistened for millennia in the religious rites, industry, sex and society of the Mediterranean, and how oil-eating, olive-growing and oil-making followed traders, soldiers and missionaries to the four corners of the world. My book also explains why fraud has plagued oil since people first started pressing it from olives, and why today it threatens the survival of the industry (though as you’ll read, fraudsters can be superb company). Perhaps most important of all, Extra Virginity introduces the many people who, for all the hardships of the trade, stubbornly continue to make the best olive oil in history. Together with an appendix on Choosing Good Oil and a companion website, www.truthinoliveoil.com, this book aims to help readers see through the fraud, and home in on skilled oil-makers and their precious nectars. Which I think you’ll find is well worth the trouble: as an oil-making lady in the deep south of Italy once told me, “Try real olive oil once, and nothing in life is ever quite the same again.”

Tom Mueller, 2013

Contents

Prologue • ESSENCES

1 • OLIVES AND LIVES

2 • OIL BOSSES

3 • OLIVES SACRED AND PROFANE

4 • THE LOVELY BURN

5 • INDUSTRIAL OIL

6 • FOOD REVOLUTIONS

7 • NEW WORLDS OF OIL

Epilogue • MYTHOLOGIES

Glossary

Appendix • CHOOSING GOOD OIL

Acknowledgments

EXTRA VIRGINITY

Prologue

ESSENCES

When the olive oil reached 28 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which its aromatic substances become volatile, the eight tasters removed the lids from the glasses that contained the first sample of oil, inserted their noses, and began snuffling loudly, some closing their eyes. These were members of the tasting panel of the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, in Milan, one of the most respected private olive oil associations; they sat in individual cubicles of white formica, each equipped with a sink, a pen and a stack of tasting forms, and a yogurt maker with a thermostat, on which sat six tulip-shaped tasting glasses containing samples of oil. They were a diverse group, which included a thirty-three-year-old farmer from Lake Garda, a forty-seven-year-old Tuscan marchesa who worked as a personal motivation coach, and a sixty-six-year-old Milanese businessman. They’d begun trickling in around 9 am, grumbling about being deprived of their morning coffee and cigarettes, which are forbidden before a tasting because they dull the senses; now they sat silently in their cubicles in attitudes of attention and reflection, like chemists in a lab, or scholars in a library. On shelves around the walls were several hundred bottles of olive oil, as well as sixteen brown laboratory bottles with neat white labels on which were printed “musty,” “fusty,” “rancid,” “winey/vinegary,” “cucumber,” “grubby,” and other unpleasant smells—the official taste flaws in olive oil, which these eight people had trained their senses to detect in the faintest degree.

The panel tasted the six oil samples according to a strict protocol, which, like each feature of the panel test room itself, was prescribed by Italian and European law. Cradling the glasses in their palms like brandy snifters to keep the oil warm, they smelled it carefully, jotting down the fragrances they perceived. They took a mouthful of oil. And then, as if they’d all been stricken by an oil-induced seizure, they began sucking in air violently at the corners of their months, a technique known as strippaggio, which coats the taste buds in an emulsion of oil and saliva, and wafts the oil’s aromas up into the nasal passages. After the first volcanic slurps, the strippaggi grew softer and more meditative and took on personal notes, the marchesa’s wheezy and almost wistful, the businessman’s deep and wet, as if he were gargling Epsom salts. After tasting and retasting each oil for ten to fifteen minutes, and periodically cleansing their palates with mineral water, they recorded its flavor, aroma, intensity, texture, and other characteristics on a scoring sheet.

The tasters pottered in their cubicles for the next ninety minutes, snuffling and slurping and musing over the oils. Finally, after evaluating the last of the samples, they stood and stretched like people rising from sleep, and moved to the conference table in the middle of the room. Here they enjoyed their long-awaited cigarettes and coffee, while the panel leader, Alfredo Mancianti, collated their scoring sheets. “The tasters themselves don’t score an oil,” Flavio Zaramella, the Milanese businessman and president of the Mastri Oleari, told me. “They just identify and quantify the sensations they perceive in it. It’s the panel leader who actually assigns a score to the oil, by making a composite of their eight assessments using robust statistical methods.”

Looking over the panel leader’s shoulder as he worked, I saw that the eight tasters had been remarkably consistent in their appraisals, describing the texture and personality of each oil in similar ways, and identifying the same subtle flavors and fragrances in each—artichoke, fresh-cut grass, green tomato, kiwi.

“The tonda iblea from southern Sicily was memorable, with those afternotes of artichoke and green tomato,” Zaramella told the other tasters. “But all in all, I think the best full-bodied oil was the Marcinase DOP Terra di Bari from Puglia.” The others nodded, though one taster said she preferred the Villa Magra Gran Cru from Tuscany because it was more balanced and harmonious.

By now I found it hard to sit still. Artichoke? Fresh-cut grass? They hadn’t been tasting first-growth Bordeaux, for heaven’s sake, but liquid fat. No doubt these oils had been made with great skill, “cold-pressed” and all that, but artichoke? Green tomato? Kiwi?

Something in my face must have alerted Zaramella to my skepticism. He stubbed out his cigarette, hopped to his feet, took my arm, and steered me into one of the tasting cubicles. “Oil talk sounds like effete nonsense, until you actually put a good oil in your mouth,” he said. He began pouring samples of oil into tulip glasses and placing them on the warmer beside me, capping each with a glass wafer to hold in the aromas. When the thermostat light went out, indicating that the oil had reached twenty-eight degrees, Zaramella showed me the approved oil-tasting technique: how to smell the sample deeply several times, trying to clear the mind between sniffs; how to take a small sip and to roll the oil around with my tongue to coat the inside of my mouth; and how to perform the loud, slurpy strippaggio. From time to time he reminded me to clean my palate with mineral water, or with a bite of a Granny Smith apple.

For the next hour, under Zaramella’s direction, like someone beginning to study ballet or yoga or violin with a master, I made my first brief foray into the vast, largely uncharted continent of extra virgin olive oil. I learned that oils made from different olive varieties, or from the same varieties grown in different places, can be every bit as diverse as wine from different grape varietals: the straw-colored casaliva oil from Lake Garda was almost sweet, with hints of pine nuts and almonds, while the emerald green moraiolo from central Tuscany was so peppery it left tears in my eyes and a lovely sear at the back of my throat. And sure enough, the tonda iblea from the hills of southeastern Sicily had distinct green tomato and artichoke overtones, just as Zaramella and his colleagues had said. Tasting these oils was like strolling through a botanic garden, touring a perfume factory, and taking a long drive through spring meadows with the windows down, all at the same time—equal parts scientific analysis and lingering, attentive hedonism.

I raised the last sample Zaramella had poured for me, sniffed it perfunctorily, and sipped. Then, after a swirling moment of bewilderment and dawning disgust, I spat it into the sink. Something was wrong with this oil: after the tart, intensely fresh-tasting essences I’d been trying until now, it felt flabby and coarse in my mouth, and tasted like spoiled fruit.

Zaramella laughed his gruff laugh. “I brought the supermarket oil last,” he said, “because it would have ruined your palate for the good ones, as surely as if you’d gargled cat piss.”

He pulled down the brown lab bottles from the shelf on the wall, and set them in a row on the conference table. “Now comes the fun part,” he told me. “You have to figure out precisely what’s wrong with this last oil. It’s like being a detective. Or a coroner.”

He opened the bottles one by one and handed them to me, telling me to try to memorize each scent. The bottles contained a stunning range of reeks, stenches, and pongs, to which their labels—“rancid,” “fusty,” “winey/vinegary,” “muddy sediment,” “metallic,” “esparto,” “grubby”—hardly did justice. Then, after several bites of the apple and a lot of deep breathing to cleanse my palate, I sampled the oil again, sniffing and tasting and trying to put names to its flaws. I thought I recognized several, and jotted them down on a profile sheet.

When I’d finished, Zaramella drew me out of the cubicle and sat me down at the conference table, seated himself across from me, lit another cigarette, and took a voluptuous drag. He scanned my sheet. “Pretty good,” he grunted, exhaling a cloud of smoke that briefly darkened the room. “‘Rancid’ and ‘fusty’ are both there. But you missed a few. The winey/vinegary is strong, and there’s noticeable muddy sediment, too.” He picked up the bottle of supermarket oil I’d been tasting. “You know, according to the law, if an oil contains just one of these defects—one hint of fusty, a trace of brine—it’s not extra virgin grade. Basta, end of story. In fact, with the flaws this oil has, it’s classed as lampante: ‘lamp oil.’ Which can only be legally sold as fuel: it’s only fit for burning, not eating. Trouble is, the law is never enforced.”

Suddenly he banged the bottle down on the tabletop, making coffee cups and ashtrays hop and rattle. “This is what nearly everyone in the world thinks is extra virgin olive oil! This stuff is killing quality oil, and putting honest oil-makers out of business. In wine, you can trust the label: if it says ‘Dom Perignon 1964’ then that’s what’s in the bottle, not last month’s Beaujolais Nouveau. In fact, champagne and Beaujolais support each other, spreading the prestige and brand recognition of French wine up and down the quality scale. But olive oil labels all say the same thing, whether the bottle contains a magnificent oil or this schifezza …” He pointed the neck of the bottle at me like a gun, then lifted his glasses to read the label. “It says what every olive oil says: 100 percent Italian, cold-pressed, stone-ground, extra virgin …”

He shook his head, as if unable to believe his eyes. “Extra virgin? What’s this oil got to do with virginity? This is a whore.”

Then, with the same precision he’d shown in the taste test, Zaramella catalogued the crimes widely practiced in the oil business. He described the deodorizing equipment he’d seen in Spanish mills, particularly in Andalucía, where it is illegally used to remove the bad flavors and aromas of inferior oils in order to sell them as extra virgin. He condemned the widespread practice of labeling heavily refined oils “pure” even though the refining process had stripped them of nearly all of their health benefits and sensory qualities, “light” although they contained the same number of calories per gram as other oils, and “organic”—from olives grown without pesticides or other chemicals—when in reality they were made from ordinary olives. Small-time oil crooks colored cheap soybean or canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, dumped in beta-carotene as a flavoring, and sold the mixture as extra virgin olive oil, in bottles adorned with Italian flags and the names of imaginary producers in famed olive-growing regions like Puglia or Tuscany. More sophisticated, large-scale frauds, he explained, required skilled chemists and multimillion-dollar laboratory facilities, and involved networks of conniving customs agents, businessmen, and government officials. Zaramella identified the headquarters of oil fraud throughout the Mediterranean, naming refineries and factories in Lugano, Switzerland; Málaga, Spain; Sfax in Tunisia; and elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean, where bogus extra virgins were fabricated. He reviewed the countries throughout the world where fake extra virgins were sold, and explained why the US was the best place on earth to sell adulterated oil.

In the coming year I spent considerable time with Zaramella, at the Milan offices of the Mastri Oleari and at oil tastings and conferences throughout Italy. I learned of his penchant for big, creative schemes and long odds: at different times in his career, he’d founded a thriving highfashion firm in Milan and traded petroleum futures through an offshore company registered in Wyoming. On a wall in his office was a map of Somalia, where, in 1987, as the head of a humanitarian aid project, he supervised the construction of a high-tech hospital in Baraawe, a city on the Indian Ocean. “I got everyone working together: Communists, Catholic priests, Muslims, professors, illiterates, anyone with the will to get things done,” he recalled. Two months after the hospital was completed, it was destroyed in the civil war. “Generosity is the purest form of egotism,” he said with a shrug. Zaramella spoke of his abdominal cancer, for which he’d undergone four operations, and of the remarkable therapeutic properties of extra virgin olive oil against numerous conditions, including cancer; his illness, he said, had given him a special sensitivity to the healing qualities of oil. And he described how he’d first become interested in olive oil fraud twenty years earlier, after he started making oil from the trees on a small farm he’d bought in Umbria, and found that the farmer who tended them had been swindling him by cutting his olive oil with cheaper sunflower-seed oil. He said he was devoting the remaining years of his life to his biggest, most difficult scheme of all: redeeming the olive oil business from fraud.

Though his operations had left him gaunt, Zaramella still had the mellow baritone and plump, animated face of the 120-kilo epicurean he’d been before his illness. “My fight is a civic responsibility,” he once told me, “to the thousands of honest oil-makers who can hardly make a living in this distorted market, and to millions of consumers who are being deprived of the therapeutic properties of quality oil. Real extra virgin olive oil contains powerful antioxidants and anti-inflammatories which help to prevent degenerative conditions—like my cancer. Fake extra virgin has next to none of them. Great oil is the essence of the Mediterranean diet. Bad oil isn’t just a deception, it’s a crime against public health.” Zaramella’s dedication to olive oil went beyond a sense of justice or the desire for a cure. Once we stood in his grove near Assisi in springtime, when yellow lilies were blooming among the trees, and looked out over one of those hillsides where Saint Francis had once sung odes to the birds and the sun and the sky. “Since ancient times, olive oil has stood for purity, health, holiness,” Zaramella said softly, almost to himself, in a voice resonant with emotion. “I’m not a religious man, but for me, olive oil is sacred.”

Here was Flavio Zaramella, a merry atheist, speaking of olive oil’s sacredness, a viveur with a terminal disease dedicating his last energies to oil’s healthfulness. Standing with him among the olives and lilies of Saint Francis, I first realized that olive oil did something special to people. Just as oil, a powerful solvent, brings out essential, sometimes unexpected flavors in food, it also reveals the essence of certain people: their hidden contradictions, their secret passions and dreams. It gets under their skin, seeps into their minds, and colors their thoughts, like no other food I know. As I went deeper into oil, I began to see this condition in many places. I recognized its symptoms in octogenarian olive farmers and nonagenarian millers, as well as eager young oil executives at multinational food companies. I saw it in the head of a food cooperative who made oil, at enormous risk, from olive groves confiscated from the mafia, and in monks who made oil from the thousand-year-old trees on their monastery grounds. I met politicians, union leaders, European Union regulators, historians, archaeologists, chemists, agronomists, and botanists, all of whose faces lit up when the conversation turned to oil, and who always had a story to tell, funny or shocking or sad. Even shady characters who’d grown rich making fake oil by the tanker-load spoke wistfully of their childhoods spent at the olive mill, and of the life lessons they learned there. In every eye was the same oily glint of unfeigned fascination with a substance they’d do things for that they’d do for nothing else on earth. All these people suffered from the same condition. They were obsessed by oil.

I began to pay closer attention to this rich, slippery, subtly mysterious substance, a vegetable oil made from a fruit, a fresh fruit juice with the ideal blend of fats for the human body, a fat that slims the arteries and nourishes the mind, an age-old food with space-age qualities that medical science is just beginning to understand. I started visiting different producers, first in Liguria where I live, then in neighboring Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany. I bought a bottle of oil from each producer, and compared two or three at a time back home, sipping from tablespoons and little shot glasses at first, then buying tulip-shaped tasting glasses for more precision. My eight- and ten-year-old sons, Jeremy and Nicholas, began tasting with me. As we sipped, I told them about the people who had made each oil, where they lived, how they talked and carried themselves. I showed them pictures, and the boys studied the faces of these oil women and oil men, noticed their weather-creased faces and large, strong-looking hands. They began to point out when certain characteristics in an oil resembled its maker—the big-bodied gruffness of Flavio Zaramella’s Flos Viridis oil, the sunny joie de vivre of a pale golden extra virgin made by a woman on Lake Garda with laughing blue eyes and blonde tresses. Before long they were holding forth about the tomato and artichoke highlights in certain oils, and even seemed to like the peppery bite of the bigger Tuscan and Pugliese cultivars, as if their young bodies sensed that the harshness was doing them good. Now and then I brought home bad oils from a discount supermarket or a well-meaning but maladroit farmer, and watched the boys sniff, wince, and hiss “lampante!” with the same righteous anger as Flavio Zaramella.

The first time my wife, Francesca, saw us sipping olive oil, her expression slid slowly from disbelief to disgust. “I’d rather eat butter cubes,” she said. My wife is from Milan, where the traditional cuisine is based on butter and lard, not oil. But I persisted. I showed her articles from the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other prominent journals about recently discovered health benefits in olive oil, against pathologies as diverse as heart disease, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. I dressed our salads with splendid and exotic oils—one night a biancolilla that brought out the bitterness of arugula, the next a nocellara del Belice that inexplicably muted it. Gradually, my wife relented. Though she still wouldn’t drink olive oil neat, she did start trying different oils on raw vegetables, salads, and in sauces. She substituted oil for butter in croissants, muffins, and cakes, which sometimes had a faint greenish tinge, as if they’d come from the garden rather than the oven, but were crusty and flavorful. These days she keeps several different olive oils in the kitchen, using them like different spices depending on the foods she cooks, and makes sure we all eat two tablespoons of top-quality oil every day, following the advice of leading medical researchers. She too is becoming one of the oil-obsessed.

Oil obsession is an ancient condition. Rereading poems and sacred texts I thought I knew well, I caught glints and scents I’d never noticed before, of a time when olive oil was not only an essential food, but a catalyst of civilized life and a vital link between people and the divine. Odysseus, haggard and salt-crusted after a shipwreck, spreads his body with oil and suddenly appears as handsome as a god. Mary Magdalene, the repentant prostitute, anoints Christ’s feet with an aromatic oil that fills the house with its fragrance, then wipes them clean with her hair. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, uses so much olive oil on his skin that his shawl is often drenched with it. I read of Egyptian pharaohs who made thank-offerings of the finest olive oil to the sun god Ra, and of the meager ration of lamp oil in the sacred Menorah, only enough for one day, that lit the Temple of Jerusalem for eight full days during its dedication until more oil could be obtained, a miracle that Jews still celebrate at Hanukkah. The dove returning to Noah’s Ark with an olive branch in its beak meant not only God’s forgiveness after the flood—the olive branch had been carried by supplicants since ancient Greek times—but that Noah had come to a land of peace: olives are slow-growing trees that require regular tending, which can only happen in peacetime.

Here and there were hints of oil’s darker side. Medieval sorcerers and Renaissance witches used olive oil in their spells and unguents, and unguentarii were said to spread the plague with tainted oil. Crime has been part of the oil trade for at least 5,000 years: the earliest known documents to mention olive oil, cuneiform tablets written at Ebla in the twenty-fourth century BC, refer to teams of inspectors who checked olive growers and millers for fraudulent practices. The warm glow of Hanukkah conceals a bloody civil war fought in 168 BC, the year of the famous miracle of the Menorah, when two Jewish factions battled for control over the Temple and over Hebrew religious practice. Olive trees themselves can be ominous. Sophocles described the unearthly, almost menacing power of a tree “not planted by men’s hands, but self-created,” and an ancient Christian legend relates that an olive tree sprouted from Adam’s grave, rooted in his skull. Some modern poets have also felt the tree’s cold shadow. Shortly before Federico García Lorca was shot by a Nationalist firing squad during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of the Guardia Civil marching implacably through olive groves in Andalucía toward the scene of a murder, as black angels “with hearts of olive oil” watched from the western sky—as if in premonition of his own death. In the age-twisted olives of Provence, Richard Wilbur saw the privation just beneath the bounty of the Mediterranean landscape:

Even when seen from near, the olive shows A hue of far away. Perhaps for this The dove brought olive back, a tree which grows Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess, Teaches the South it is not paradise.

The fruit and fragrance of good oil are tempered with bitterness, as life’s beauty is.

Why, I wondered, are olive branches and trees such enduring symbols, even in places where they aren’t native? What is it about oil itself that has made it a universal liquid for millennia, seeping into every aspect of human life? And how did life in this oil-soaked world look, smell, and feel—the temples and bedchambers and bathhouses in the clear yellow light of oil lamps, the people dosing themselves with vast quantities of oil? For me, the anointing is the hardest of all to imagine. How did it feel when your entire body glistened and slithered with scented oil? When, like the high priest Aaron, anointing oil dripped from your hair into your beard, soaking your robes down to their hems? Or when a prostitute smoothed your feet with shining oil, then wiped them with her hair? It’s hard to imagine, as I say, but tempting to try.

I began a series of experiments. I bought several oil lamps, replicas of medieval and Roman models, and lit them throughout the house, their flames floating above dark pools of oil and emanating a faint sweetness, bathing familiar scenes in the tremulous amber light of the past. I tried olive oil as a skin lotion: it softened chapped lips and soothed sunburn, and healed my baby daughter’s diaper rash with one application. I made a batch of soap on the stovetop, mixing olive oil with tallow and lye, and pouring the resulting paste into molds I’d cut from blocks of olive wood. The soap produced a pinkish, faintly slimy lather which left the skin wonderfully soft, but was too slippery for washing dishes (as we decided after several broken plates). I tested olive oil’s qualities as a solvent and lubricant, polishing mirrored surfaces on an old toaster and chrome trim, revealing new depths of grain in a battered walnut tabletop, silencing squeaky windows and doors throughout the house. I poured out little jars of oil and dropped in garlic cloves, rosemary sprigs, orange rind, and boiled eggs, and found within days that their olfactory essences had leached into the oil and now lingered there, magically imprisoned, like genies in a bottle. I jury-rigged a still from a pressure cooker and a coil of copper tubing, used it to extract essential oils from lavender, wisteria, jasmine, and bergamot, then stirred these essences into an olive oil base, creating vividly scented oils which I rubbed on my face, and furtively into my hair, thinking how it would be to play the Old Testament priest and pour the entire jar over my head, drenching my beard and dripping from my clothes.

The origins of olive oil’s universal appeal are being uncovered today, by scientists in a range of fields with whom I consulted, each opening another doorway on this wide new world. With nutritionists and lipid chemists I peered into the molecular structure of olive oil, glimpsing the natural antioxidants and fatty acids which once induced people to anoint their heads and smear their faces with oil, following some obscure instinct to health. They used it to cleanse and beautify their skin because the primary lipid component of oil, oleic acid, is a powerful solvent which also enables oil to extract flavors in cooking and hold fragrances in perfume. Both the practical and the mythical popularity of oil derive, at least partly, from the almost miraculous agronomic characteristics of the olive tree, which thrives even in desert conditions and, when destroyed by fire or frost, sends up green shoots from the root ball through which the tree is reborn. The olive tree’s crop is itself a minor miracle. As one agronomist told me, “The yield of an olive tree is an upward curve, tending towards infinity.” There was a hint of wonder in his voice.

Continuing my search for answers about olive oil, I began to travel to places where great oil is made, and where it remains in some way central to daily life. Eventually I circled the Mediterranean, from southern Spain and North Africa to the West Bank and the eastern coast of Crete, seeing landscapes shaped by ancient groves, getting to know lifeways and folklore and religious rites steeped in their oil. Later I traveled even farther afield, meeting oil-makers in California and Chile, on the slopes of Table Mountain in South Africa and the Wheatbelt of far western Australia—places where olive trees and Mediterranean ways were oddly transmuted by the distance, yet fundamentally familiar.

But the first stage of my olive oil journey, and in many ways the most important, was to Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot. This region produces a large part of Italy’s oil, as it has for thousands of years, back when the hillsides of famous oil areas like Tuscany and Liguria, Spain and North Africa were bare of groves, and oliviculture in America and Australia were millennia away. Wild olives, or termiti, have thrived in Puglia’s hot, dry climate since the last ice age, providing sturdy rootstock on which farmers grafted the domestic olive trees brought there by Phoenician traders and Greek colonists. Many pugliesi still pour a cross of olive oil on their soup, and pause at midday by the hearth to drink a little cup of warmed oil, daily rituals of health and propitiation. Olive oil has been a staple here forever, and its beauty and ugliness come through with singular clarity.

1

OLIVES AND LIVES

On this the maids came to a halt and began calling one another back. They made Odysseus sit down in the shelter as Nausicaa had told them, and brought him a shirt and cloak. They also brought him the little golden flask of olive oil, and told him to go wash in the stream. But Odysseus said, “Young women, please to stand a good way off, so I may wash the brine from my shoulders and anoint myself with oil, for it has been a long time since my skin has had a drop of oil upon it. I cannot wash as long as you all are standing there. I am ashamed to strip stark naked before good-looking young women.”

Then they stood aside and went to tell their mistress, while Odysseus washed himself in the stream and scrubbed the brine from his back and broad shoulders. When he had thoroughly bathed all over, and had got the brine out of his hair, he anointed himself with oil, and put on the clothes which the young woman had given him, Athena made him look taller and stronger than before, she also made the hair grow thick on the top of his head, and flow down in curls like hyacinth blossoms; she glorified him about the head and shoulders as a skilful workman who has studied art of all kinds under Hephaestus and Athena enriches a piece of silver plate by gilding it—and his work is full of beauty. He went down to the beach and sat a little way off glistening in his glory, breathtakingly handsome, and the young woman gazed on him with admiration. Then she said to her maids:

“Hush, my dears, for I want to say something. I believe the gods of Olympus have sent this man to the Phaeacians. When I first saw him I thought him plain, but now his appearance is like that of the gods who dwell in heaven. I should like my future husband to be just such a man as he is.”

—Homer, Odyssey, Book VI

From 30,000 feet, the landscape of Puglia scrolling by below is a vast patchwork quilt of irregularly-shaped fields, each decorated with green polka dots of varying sizes: some as small as pinpricks and arranged in neat grids, others larger and irregularly scattered across the fields. As the plane descends through 5,000 feet toward a landing at Bari airport, and the aquamarine band of the Mediterranean comes into view, you see that the polka dots are olive trees: the small ones are young trees planted in neat ranks and files, according to modern agronomic practice, while the larger dots are ancient trees with huge, cloudlike crowns growing more or less randomly across the fields, where they were growing when the Crusaders rode through Puglia on their way to the Holy Land.

Olive trees grow close to the runway, and line the road on either side into town; many are ancient, corkscrew-trunked giants right out of the forests of fairy tale, with long limbs reaching horizontally and ending in drooping, witchlike fingers, a pruning method called “the chandelier.” On and on the olive groves go as you drive south, and as far as you can see in every direction, toward the low sandy coastline and the limestone plateau inland. Puglia’s sixty million olive trees are owned by 250,000 pugliesi—an average of 240 trees per person—in groves that have grown gradually smaller and more jagged as they’ve been passed down through the generations. Here and there is a bench in the shade of a big tree, or a tiny cottage of whitewashed stone that serves as both garden shed and vacation home, with an open-air oven for pizza or bread. The red soil is full of pale yellow fieldstones, which have been gathered and stacked to make dry-wall fences between the fields: olives, with their low, broad root systems, thrive in rocky, well-drained, calcareous soil. In sunny patches along the walls grow masses of climbing jasmine, and tall, flourishing Indian figs, also called the prickly pear, whose flat, oblong leaves give the scene a pinch of desert grit.

Six large swatches of Puglia’s patchwork quilt belong to the De Carlo family, who since the year 1600 have made oil from their groves in the flat limestone lowlands of Bitritto, just southeast of Bari. Today the family business is led by Grazia and Saverio, the matriarch and patriarch of the De Carlo clan. They are an unlikely pair, the Lady and the Farmer. She is dark and plump and pretty, immaculate in her pleated skirts, cashmere cardigans, gold bracelets, and a string of fat pearls. He is rawboned and slope-shouldered, with the windburned face and layered flannel and polar fleece clothes of a man who spends most of his time outdoors, in all weather. Grazia fixes you with dark brown eyes that are warm yet penetrating, like a hawk’s, and speaks eagerly and eloquently, her tanned hands fanning and fisting. Saverio speaks softly, with lowered eyes, as if shy, or weary. Often he’ll sketch out a thought with a few words, as terse and weighty as a poem, then fall silent and let Grazia fill it in. “A good oil-maker needs technology and the hoe,” he says, and then makes a little motion of entreaty to his wife, who amplifies: “To make the best oils, we combine the latest milling machinery with a mastery of traditional agricultural methods.”

Spend a day with them, though, and you see that despite their differences—or perhaps because of them—Grazia and Saverio are a perfect pair. You sense this by the way their children, Marina and Francesco, in their mid-twenties, fall silent and listen when either of them speaks, with brief glances of affection and complicity. You know by the way they’ll be good-naturedly poking fun at each other one moment, and the next, without really meaning to, bragging about each other. “Just look at how healthy he is,” Grazia says, jabbing her finger into her husband’s thick forearm, knotty as cordwood. “He’s spent his life hefting hundredkilo bags of olives out of the back of trucks, and eating ridiculous quantities of olive oil. By now he’s indestructible.” Saverio says of Grazia: “At first she hated the olive oil business, but her courage and new ideas have made us a success—and right now they’re what’s keeping us afloat.”