Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  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 high-fashion 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 poets have 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 P
uglia’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.

  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: