Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  A commodity of this importance became a vital bargaining chip in the politics of empire, and was sometimes preferred to cash. Julius Caesar, wanting to punish Leptis Magna for taking part in the resistance to his invasion of Africa, fined the town fathers three million Roman pounds, or 1,067,800 liters, of olive oil. Olive oil could smooth the path to power in the empire. Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian were scions of olive oil clans in Baetica (today Andalucía), and Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna, capital of the famous oil-producing region of Tripolitana (modern-day Libya), where his family had grown rich making oil and the amphorae to ship it. “I’ve always thought of [Septimius Severus] as somewhat parallel to an oil sheikh,” says David Mattingly, a professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Leicester and an authority on Roman olive cultivation. “Olive oil was the source of fabulous wealth and power.”

  Having obtained his authority through oil, Septimius Severus used oil to keep it. Shortly after his accession, he asked the citizens of Leptis for a “voluntary” donation of one million pounds of olive oil per year—the mafia-style offer they couldn’t refuse—and distributed it free to the Roman populace. (The amphorae it arrived in, naturally, were dumped on Monte Testaccio.) His strategy, which might be called the “bread, circuses, and olive oil” approach to boosting his approval rating, worked: Severus ruled successfully for nearly two decades, and transferred his power to his two degenerate sons, Caracalla and Geta, murmuring to them on his deathbed, “Get along with each other, give piles of money to the soldiers, and forget about everybody else.” (His sons, lacking his oil man’s savvy, paid no attention, and ended badly.)

  Since the Roman legions frequently planted olive trees where they were stationed, for food and fuel, the gnarled trunks and gray-green leaves of the olive became symbols of conquest and cultural ascendancy. As Aldous Huxley observed, “The crown of olive was originally worn by Roman conquerors at ovation; the peace it proclaimed was the peace of victory, the peace which is too often only the tranquillity of exhaustion or complete annihilation.” A jug of olive oil on the dinner table likewise marked the triumph of Roman cuisine over barbarian beer and lard. “The inhabitants lead the most miserable existence of all mankind,” wrote a homesick Roman senator of the second century AD posted to a settlement on the Danube, deep in the beer and pork fat forests of the barbarian north. “For they cultivate no olives, and they drink no wine.” Culinary historian Massimo Montanari claims that the Romans considered oil, like wine and bread, to be “symbols of their own identity” that demonstrated the Roman ability to shape nature itself, since none of these foods exists in nature. “They become material and mental markers, in the sociological sense, of romanitas,” Montanari says.

  A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world’s answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals. In fact, oil fraud is far older than the Romans. The five-millennia-old cuneiform tablets from Ebla describe investigators charged with combating oil fraud, naming the “olive oil surveillance team at Nuzar,” near modern-day Aleppo in Syria, and a certain Ingar, head of the royal anti-fraud brigades. Oil fraud appears to have been widespread in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Romans, too, experienced a measure of it. The physician Galen mentions oil traders who cut high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like liquefied lard. Among the many oil-drenched recipes of Apicius, the wealthy merchant and bon vivant whose cookbook was a bestseller in antiquity, is a procedure for doctoring cheap, smelly Spanish oil—the kind whose amphorae built Monte Testaccio—with minced herbs and roots, to make it taste and smell like prized oil from Istria.

  Yet in preventing oil fraud, as in so many other areas of life, the Romans had a system. Many amphora fragments bear tituli picti, stamped inscriptions or handwritten notes in black or red ink that record information such as the locality where the oil was produced, the name of the producer, the weight and quality of the oil when the amphora was sealed, and the name of the merchant who imported it. Other annotations record the name of the imperial functionary who confirmed this information when the amphora was reopened at its destination in Rome. The purpose of this vast bureaucratic apparatus and of the detailed, explicit labeling of each amphora was to ensure that none of the middlemen in the long supply chain linking the olive groves in Spain and Africa to the imperial oil warehouses in Rome siphoned off oil, or substituted an inferior product. Monte Testaccio is a monument to the fight against international food fraud.

  That fight continues in Italy today, though the methods and results are less impressive. The enormous popularity of the “Made in Italy” label worldwide makes it an appetizing target for food fraudsters, who earn an estimated €60 billion a year selling counterfeit or adulterated faux-Italian foods. In some of these crimes, mafia syndicates and other criminal networks sell substandard or unsafe products at huge profits. In the so-called Italburro scandal, for example, several dairies near Naples controlled by the Camorra blended up fake butter from vegetable oils, lard, petrochemicals, and animal carcasses (some possibly infected with BSE, or mad cow disease), and sold 22,000 tons of their product throughout the EU. Other cases involve “legal frauds,” which, though seemingly unethical, are nevertheless permitted under Italian and EU law and are not mentioned on labels. Four “Italian” products in ten are actually foreign imports relabeled as Italian, often with false certificates of authenticity: over a third of pasta manufactured in Italy is made from imported wheat, half of mozzarella is produced with German milk and curds, and two-thirds of prosciutto comes from foreign hogs.

  Many more cases fall somewhere in between, linking large, outwardly reputable companies with criminals, either directly or through a series of trading companies and intermediaries. Since price competition in the food industry is fierce, companies are often willing to buy their raw materials from dubious sources, even at prices so low they suggest that the foods may be fake. The Camorra-made butter in the Italburro scandal was bought up by major food companies in Belgium, France, and Germany, some of which were household names, and resold to consumers as butter and in ice cream and sweets. Regarding these high-profile companies, Paulo Casaca, former EU parliamentarian and head of the European Commission’s Budget Committee, who followed the case on behalf of the EU, observes: “I’m not sure which is worse—that these companies knowingly bought tainted butter and resold it to consumers, or that, as they claim, they didn’t know what they were buying, meaning that they weren’t competent to distinguish between real and fake butter.” (Italburro’s clients also collected generous EU subsidies for the production and sale of their “butter.”)

  In another case dating from 2005, prosecutors allege that Francesco Casillo, head of Europe’s leading producer of semolina for pasta, brought a transport ship into Bari harbor loaded with Canadian wheat infected with a carcinogenic mold, whisked it through customs using false analytical results prepared by a complicit food chemist, then sold it to a number of major pasta manufacturers, who used it to make fusilli and rigatoni subsequently bought by consumers throughout Italy. (The case is being tried in a court in Puglia, and Casillo maintains his innocence.) More recently, in November 2010, a biodiesel company delivered three batches of fatty acids intended for industrial uses, such as paper production, to a German manufacturer of vegetable feed fat. These fatty acids were contaminated with dioxin, an industrial by-product and potent carcinogen; nevertheless, they were blended into the feed fat, yielding as much as 2,256 tons of tainted feed fat, which was sold to twenty-five compound feed manufacturers. They, in turn, used it in their animal feeds, which they supplied to thousands of poultry, pig, dairy cattle, beef, rabbit, and goose farms in Germany, France, and Denmark. European health officials continue to analyze potentially affected foods, but have ordered extensive farm blockages and product recalls.

  More disturbing than these individual cases of food contamination, however, is the likelihood that, for each case which comes to light, many more occur without ever being detected by authorities. Spe
aking of the tainted semolina incident, Antonio Barile, president of the Puglia chapter of Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori (CIA), a major farmers’ union, says that the case “opens a terrifying window on what for years we have defined as ‘the economy of deceit’ in Italian food. The events in the Casillo case date from 2005, but we suspect that the arrival of contaminated shipments is a regular feature of the grain imports into our country.” In Italy, a range of enforcement agencies works to protect the food industry, including military police forces like the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza, the agriculture ministry’s Fraud Repression Unit, customs and public health offices, even the forestry service. Despite their collective efforts—2009 saw some 600,000 inspections, over 66,000 irregularities detected, and seized goods valued at about €160 million—food fraud is rising steeply. The trend is the same worldwide. OLAF, the anti-fraud agency of the European Union, reports the rapid spread of food adulteration and counterfeiting. In 2009, a new Food Fraud Advisory Unit was formed in the United Kingdom to meet the rising pressure of food crime. In the US, where retail sales of foods and beverages were worth $560 billion in 2010, several major academic institutes including Michigan State University have recently established food fraud centers, and President Barack Obama has created a presidential task force that is discussing steps to radically improve testing and enforcement by official agencies (at present the FDA only tests 0.3 percent of the total American food supply).

  Admittedly, the size and far-flung internationalization of the food and agriculture sector, which has been estimated to be worth something like $5 trillion per year worldwide, makes policing it very difficult. But the reasons food fraud is on the rise go well beyond size and globalism. Some frauds are committed by companies whose chemical knowledge and expertise far outstrip those of the investigators. The enormous profits associated with food allow unscrupulous businessmen to bribe often low-paid customs agents and law enforcers. This is all the more true when the companies cooperating in the fraud are multinational concerns, who thanks to their deep pockets can influence legislators, pay for powerful advertising campaigns, and employ legal action to silence individuals and media who question their practices. Ultimately, however, the central reason fraud is on the rise is that most governments lack the political will to confront it. In an age of laissez-faire economics and blind faith in the free market, companies are often given a free hand, even at the expense of consumers.

  The Romans, who created and ran one of the largest and longest-lived international empires in history, largely thanks to their immense pragmatism, even cynicism, knew this attitude, and had a phrase for it: caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.” But Monte Testaccio proves that the Romans sometimes took better care of the buyer than they let on. When you purchased an amphora of oil in the Roman world, you knew from the label exactly what you were getting.

  DOMENICO RIBATTI, former olive oil tycoon, greets me at the door of his apartment in the center of Andria, a town forty kilometers northwest of Bari that is one of centers of olive oil production in Puglia. He is a small, slender man of seventy, with large amber eyes and thick, arched, salt-and-pepper eyebrows which give him a knowing look. His voice is surprisingly deep for someone his size, but soft and slightly reedy. This wasn’t the voice I imagined as I’d read the court sentences against him, which contained numerous police intercepts of his phone calls, where he’d spoken as a man used to success, to power, to giving orders and seeing them carried out swiftly. The rough, reddish, slightly puffy texture to the skin, the careful way he walks as he leads the way across the apartment to his office, suggests he’s been unwell. “This whole business has ruined my health,” he says wearily. “They dragged out one trial into thirteen separate trials.”

  The blinds are drawn; the spacious apartment is filled with a blue-green, almost undersea twilight. We pass a low, broad, pale divan with a side table on which is a framed photograph of two young girls in ballet costumes—his daughters, he says, now in their thirties. There are several glass cases containing little boxes and animal figurines, inlaid with ivory and rare hardwoods, which glint in the low light, like a museum at closing time. His office, however, is bright and tidy. A shelf along one wall contains sheaves of documents in blue folders. “These are all of my trials,” Ribatti tells me, resting his hand on one of the folders like a farmer with a prize bull, familiar but dangerous.

  On the walls are photographs and documents. There is a photo of Lumière, Ribatti’s foster daughter from the Congo, to whom he sends €40 each month. There is also a long, typewritten letter from one of his daughters, which she sent him while he was in prison. “Thirteen months and two days,” he says with a slight quaver in his voice, looking at the letter. “I’m very Christian—profoundly so—and I’ve had a family who has supported me throughout. Which helped me to survive.” And there is Ribatti in 1990, just before the troubles began, receiving the award for Best Extra Virgin Olive Oil Supplier from a Unilever representative: suntanned, handsome, with a suave smile of success. He is a changed man today.

  Ribatti was the third son of four sons and four daughters of Giuseppe Ribatti, a classic example of a self-made man of the early years of the twentieth century, when so many southern Italians were escaping the grim poverty of their homeland and emigrating to the United States, Australia, and South America. Ribatti, who spent much of his childhood in a Benevento boarding school run by a local religious order, speaks of his father with pride and perhaps an edge of fear: an intensely hardworking, parsimonious, and unselfish man, who learned the oil trade by doing odd jobs in local mills until 1920, when he’d amassed enough cash and experience to open his own. “He started with nothing and worked his way up,” Ribatti said. “He earned and invested, earned and invested, never taking big risks—he was a very prudent man. . . . Everyone says that I took after papà.”

  Ribatti’s father continued to expand his mill, and eventually bought a second one. By 1963, the two facilities together were capable of milling 30,000 kilograms of olives a day. In that year, just as Domenico was about to complete his university degree in Parma, his father summoned him back home to join the family business. “I was only missing five exams and two reports, and had already started my thesis, on olive oil,” Ribatti says with a touch of regret. His life had taken a fundamental turn. By the time his father died, in 1971, Domenico and his brothers were running a flourishing oil business, which, he says, sold about 75 percent of its product in bulk to major olive oil companies like Bertolli, Sasso, Filippo Berio, and Carapelli, and the remainder to consumers under their own label.

  Three years later, in 1974, Domenico Ribatti went into business for himself, founding a new company, Riolio S.p.A. Instead of the conservative approach of his father, he earned a reputation for making big, bold decisions. In the late 1950s, a number of vegetable oil refineries opened in Puglia, where lampante oil was purified of its unpleasant tastes and odors; Ribatti bought a small refinery near Andria, and rapidly expanded it into a production center of 55,000 square meters. “I set a goal, which I later achieved, to be the leader in the international market,” he says. By 1985, in fact, Ribatti was the world’s foremost dealer in bulk olive oil. “First and foremost I was a speculator: I’d guess which way the market was going, and jump in with purchases five or six months in advance. I always nailed it—I always read the market right. I’d buy up ten, twenty, thirty thousand tons of oil that I knew would come in handy to Bertolli, Sasso, Carapelli, Unilever.” His company remained in constant contact with its larger clients, and sometimes sent them entire tanker ships of oil. “We were expert tasters. We knew the companies well, and what standard of oil they wanted. We’d prepare and ship them lots of one thousand, two thousand tons.” He says that he and a few other large companies helped to set the market price of olive oil. “We’d talk on the phone each morning, according to the deals we had to make. It’s not that we’d created a cartel; we were just doing well by the producers and the millers, and doing well by ourselve
s, too.”

  Ribatti employed sales agents in Tunisia, Turkey, and Spain to make purchases of oil on his behalf, and traveled incessantly: throughout the Mediterranean to monitor the yearly olive crop and maintain contacts with oil dealers; to Switzerland to manage the intricate financial structure he had set up to handle his oil transactions; and to Rome, where he sat on the board of directors of ASSITOL, the powerful Italian trade association of oil producers, and of several other national oil associations. He was on the road so much that he missed the birth of his children. “The people at ASSITOL used to say, ‘Domenico Ribatti has oil in his veins instead of blood,’” he remarks.

  Ribatti turns to look at the photograph on the wall, of himself receiving the extra virgin award from the Unilever executive. He says he recently visited the ASSITOL offices in Rome. “They got all choked up when they saw me, they had tears in their eyes. ‘Since you’ve left the business, it has gone to shit. We can’t understand a thing anymore.’” He shakes his head, still looking at the photograph, as if struggling to recognize himself, to remember his earlier life, and how things were before. “From December 17, 1991, when a former friend turned against me, I’ve battled for eighteen years—for a lifetime.” His voice has dropped to a murmur. He claims that investigative magistrate Domenico Seccia, a friend with whom he formerly used to go to dinner, suddenly subjected him to a species of judicial persecution. “I paid for the others,” he says. “I was a scapegoat.”