(Plainly I'm not above a risqué title to shamelessly drive web traffic but I'm afraid this post is all about fraud in the international extra virgin olive oil trade.) I'm an unsophisticated but enthusiastic aficionado of extra virgin olive oils, ever since a sabbatical in Spain years ago. I was aware of
Tom Mueller's 2007 New Yorker article on international trade in adulterated extra virgin olive oils (EVOO), but somehow hadn't read it, as I figured I knew what it said. Reading Mueller's subsequent 2011 book,
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, which my daughter gave me for Christmas, well, I was horrified. Well, seriously deflated at least; we're not talking about war crimes here. But really irritated, speaking as a consumer who has willingly paid not-inconsiderable amounts for EVOO on the theory that college is overrated.
It's not that my palate is so very refined, I hasten to add. I've yet to discover, for example, the "banana" notes in the latest olive oil sample delivered by Santa, let alone the "artichoke" and "berry," despite oxygenating it while noisily slurping it with the special technique I learned at one tasting (and which drives my wife from the kitchen). I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to identify a bad or even stale ("fusty") EVOO. I'm even less sure, now that I've understood from Mueller's book just how much of the normal stuff, and even premium priced stuff - and especially the stuff arriving to market shelves in the United States - is low grade ordinary olive oil (
"lampante," meaning fuel or lamp oil), or other seed oils, deodorized and refined through heat and solvents to the point of being tasteless, with a variable amount of EVOO added for flavor.
If I'm dismayed as a consumer, speaking as a professor of international economic law, I'm both shocked and astonished at the levels of fraud in the international EVOO trade. I naively assumed that olive oil, given its importance in the EU, would be regulated with nearly as much care as wine. It turns out that, quite apart from illegal adulteration, EU regulations permit olive oil to be brought to Italy from Spain, Greece, and in many cases both legally and illegally from Morocco or Tunisia, processed and packaged and sold as Italian olive oil. Italian law on adulteration, far from being concerned about the protection of a national reputation for setting the world-standard, demonstrates all the characteristics of regulatory capture. Mueller's outrage is not merely on behalf of defrauded consumers worldwide (including the EU and Italian publics, who are no more knowledgeable about olive oil adulteration than people anywhere else), however, but is particularly directed to the economic pressures that the adulteration puts on the mostly smaller producers who do maintain quality standards, in accordance with law. They simply can't compete with products that appear indistinguishable from theirs, but whose costs are a mere fraction.
