by Mueller, Tom
Conte is an imposing figure, a tall, densely bearded man in his mid-fifties, with a resonant basso voice smoothed by decades of lecturing and a slight hump over his right shoulder, the result of a birth defect, which give him the stage presence of a Shakespearean actor. But he knows how to put the children at their ease.
“When I distribute the glasses of oil, I always say to smell them, but to wait before sipping them. There’s always a show-off, though, who gulps both oils right down. So I point to him and say, ‘You drank that? The bad oil too? What a moron!’ Which always gets a big laugh, and starts the session off well.”
Udine is in Friuli, at the northeastern tip of Italy. From the restaurant where we sat, the green fields and stone farmhouses just a few kilometers away were in Austria and Croatia. Conte joked that he’d been “posted to the outer limits of the empire,” much like that forlorn Roman senator of the second century AD, deep in barbarian territory on the Danube. In fact, Udine is on the oil-and-lard watershed that once divided the lands of the Roman Empire from the barbarian backcountry, a border still marked to this day by church steeples: the sharp spires of churches built by the Republic of Venice rise in places where people habitually eat olive oil, while the onion domes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire mark the lands of the lard-eaters. Our restaurant was in the lard zone: my cabbage stew and frico, a cheese-and-potato pancake, had the dense tang of pork fat, and nothing on the menu contained olive oil. The country kids Lanfranco Conte teaches about oil come from both worlds: some are from oil-making regions like Istria, famous since Roman times, while others have never tried oil in their lives. “Whatever their background, though, it’s nice to see the enthusiasm and freshness that they bring to the subject,” Conte said. “They have no prejudices about what olive oil should taste like, much less the blind certainty of so many adults in Italy that the oil their grandfathers make is the best on earth.”
During his olive oil lessons in schools, after distributing the first pair of oils Conte has the children smell them carefully, then taste them. “They quickly recognize the good and bad oils. Their senses are almost as sharp as my cat’s, and they sometimes describe the oils with a chemist’s insights.” One boy sniffed an oil that had a flaw known as “fusty” and said, “This smells like cow.” Puzzled, Lanfranco Conte asked what he meant, and the boy explained that the oil reminded him of the smell in his father’s dairy barn when the milking machines needed washing. In fact, Conte said, this sour-milk scent was produced by the same lactic acid fermentation that causes fustiness.
Conte’s occupation, which he calls “the best job in the world,” is to teach at university and analyze foods, especially olive oil, in his laboratory, working out the biochemical causes of cow-smell, greasy mouthfeel, and the hundreds of other tastes, odors, and sensations produced by oil. “My wife knows when I’ve spent the day in the lab, because I come home as carefree as if I’d just taken a long motorcycle ride through the mountains.” Conte loves nothing better than to peer into the deep chemistry of olive oil, scrutinizing the length and kinks in its fatty acid chains, the concentration of its phenols and configurations of its sterols and the degradation of its volatile compounds, which taken together document the life history of each oil. Some of his tests measure an oil’s freshness, and may reveal errors made by the farmer or miller while making it. For example, a high level of free fatty acids, which are produced as oil decomposes, suggests that the oil was made from spoiled fruit or extracted using outdated methods. He measures the amount of peroxides in an oil, which rises as the oil combines with oxygen in the air and goes rancid; high peroxide levels indicate that an oil may have been exposed to the air for too long during milling, malaxing, or storage, or is simply old.
Sometimes Conte finds more sinister clues to an oil’s past. Elevated levels of erythrodiol and uvaol, or more than 225 parts per million of waxes, indicate that an oil probably has been illegally blended with pomace oil, while unusually high levels of arachic or linolenic fatty acids suggest it has been cut with canola or soybean oil. Conte uses further tests to identify contaminants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), chemical compounds formed during the incomplete combustion of organic substances which have been found in olive pomace oils (pomace is dried in furnaces before its oil is extracted) and have been shown to cause cancer as well as genetic and neurological damage. “My job isn’t as easy as it looks on television shows like CSI or Quincy, where the hero puts a sample into the mass spectrometer, hits a few buttons, sees a peak as big as Mount Everest, and announces, ‘This is cocaine!’ But each transformation in the oil, whether natural or man-made, leaves traces that a good chemist can pick up.”
The analogy with detective work is appropriate. Conte formerly headed a laboratory of the agriculture ministry’s Fraud Repression Unit, which tested olive oil and other foods for contaminants, adulteration, and other irregularities. Today he uses his dual experience as chemist and law-enforcer to devise chemical tests for the different quality grades of oil, which in turn enter Italian and EU laws on olive oil, helping to make extra virgin olive oil the most tightly controlled food in the world—at least on paper.
Conte refilled my glass with the local white wine we’d been drinking, and together we enjoyed its crispness and cold floral notes. He explained that it was formerly called Tocai, a word which recalls the famous Tokaji or Tokaj wine produced in northeastern Hungary and southeastern Slovakia, but is made with different grapes that are locally known by Italian producers as Tocai. After vigorous protests from Hungarian and Slovakian wine-growers, however, the EU granted them the exclusive use of this denomination, and the Italians had to rename their wine.
“So it’s a wine made from the Tocai grape varietal, but can’t be called a Tocai,” Conte said. “Now they’ve started calling it Friulano.” He laughed, and made an odd face. “Another example of how different the wine and oil businesses are.”
“One thing’s for sure,” he said, lifting his wineglass and gazing through the luminous liquid. “You don’t see this stuff traveling around in tanker ships. You don’t see tanker-loads of Bordeaux either, or single-malt scotch. But even though extra virgin olive oil is as fine and as perishable as any of these, tankers with 3,000-ton loads of extra virgin olive oil are crisscrossing the Mediterranean.”
“Extra virgin . . .” he repeated, in his deepest, most theatrical voice, dripping with irony. “That’s how they label it, anyway.”
While working in the Fraud Repression Unit, Conte said, he learned quite a bit about olive oil tankers, and about the profound differences between the olive oil and wine businesses. He was a chemist at the unit’s laboratory when the methanol scandal broke, and he saw the subsequent government crackdown that purged the Italian wine industry of many low-grade producers, vastly improving the overall quality of Italian wine. During the methanol scandal he and the other investigators in the Fraud Repression Unit were given a free hand to unmask unscrupulous producers who were adulterating their wines. In olive oil, by contrast, the deck frequently seemed stacked against them. Lab employees and other officials responsible for detecting adulterated oil were (and still are) criminally liable if their actions against suspected olive oil offenders proved unfounded and caused economic loss. “If you decide to block three thousand tons of oil and it turns out you were wrong, you pay out of your own pocket,” he said angrily. “Who’s going to take this responsibility?”
Conte said that since 1991, policy-makers at the International Olive Council and the European Union have attempted to improve olive oil quality by tightening the parameters for free acidity, peroxides, and other chemical values required for each olive oil grade. In the end, however, they haven’t been able to go far enough, because of resistance by producers and traders, many of whom fear that more stringent quality levels will bar their oils from the market. Conte says that the current free acidity level of 0.8 percent for the extra virgin grade is still much too high to ensure excellent oil, which typically has 0.5 perc
ent or less, and he calls the current peroxide level of 20 milliequivalents per kilo “indecent.”
We drank our wine in silence. Then, like several of the olive oil producers I’d spoken with, Lanfranco Conte wished aloud for a health scandal in olive oil equivalent to the methanol scare in Italian wine, which would lead to serious new laws, tough enforcement, and a generalized cleanup of the oil business, as he’d seen in wine. “Trouble is, olive oil has already had its scandal.” He mentioned the so-called “toxic oil syndrome,” an incident in Spain in 1981 during which over 20,000 people were poisoned by fake olive oil made from rapeseed oil denatured with aniline, a highly toxic organic compound used to manufacture plastics. An estimated eight hundred people died, and thousands more were left with permanent neurological and autoimmune damage. Conte glanced at me to see if I understood. Fake olive oil had caused thirty times more deaths than methanol, yet the oil business remained as slippery as ever.
INDUSTRIAL OIL
Wild olives out of red earth
(Blood of past praise and death)
first tasted in a crooked orchard
that clung on crumbling terraces—
the peculiar taste of wild olives
all the green of the world
in their green smooth skins.
—William Oxley, “The Peculiar
Taste of Wild Olives”
Virgin Olive Oils: The oil obtained from the fruit of the olive exclusively with mechanical processes and other physical processes, in conditions that do not cause alternations in the oil, and which have not undergone any treatment apart from washing, decantation, centrifugation and filtration, excluding oils obtained with solvents or with chemical or biochemical reagents or with processes of reesterification or any mixture with oils of other nature.
—European Union Law 1513/2001
It wasn’t the vials of liquid as black as tar which were labeled oil, or the smells of smoke, solvents, and rancidity, or even the ancient furnaces caked with charred, toxic-looking organic material. It was the starving cats that got me, standing among the furnaces and watching the workers eat lunch. The workers saw me looking at the cats, noticed my shock at their tattered, lumpy coats and spade-sharp hips and spent, streaming eyes, almost past caring. And the men raised their chins in defiance.
Food should not be made here.
I was touring the Rubino pomace plant with Michele Rubino, the friendly and plain-spoken director of quality control, a member of the family that has run this sansificio in the southern outskirts of Bari for four generations. “This used to be open countryside,” he said as we walked through the courtyard, where the tall smokestack and jets of steam looked odd against the apartment buildings behind. “But now we’re in the city. There have been complaints about the smell.” In one corner of the yard were huge piles of pomace, the solid residue of olive skins, stems, pits, and leaves left over from olive oil extraction, which still contains about 8 percent of the oil made by the olives. The Rubino plant removes this residual oil.
We walked through the facility as Michele Rubino explained the process. Front-end loaders dump the pomace into a large hopper, from which it moves into a steel tube heated by the furnaces, that rotates slowly until most of the moisture in the pomace has evaporated. The dried pomace is transferred into tall silos and drenched with hexane, an industrial solvent. After the residual oil dissolves into the hexane, leaving the pomace, a blast of steam as loud as a cannon-shot drives the mixture of solvent and oil into a separate tank, where it’s heated to evaporate off the hexane. What’s left is a dense, black liquid known as crude pomace oil, vials of which Michele Rubino had shown me in his office. Before this oil can be sold as food, it’s piped into a refinery in an adjoining building for desolventization, deacidification, deodorization, degumming, and other chemical processes. The resulting clear, odorless, tasteless fat is blended with a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to give it flavor, and is sold as “olive pomace oil.”
This substance is a poor cousin to extra virgin olive oil, with a dubious past. From time to time, Italian and EU health inspectors have detected toxins, mineral oil, and carcinogenic material in pomace oil; there have been Europe-wide health alerts for contaminated pomace oil, leading to product recalls and confiscations. In Italy, pomace extraction plants like the Rubino sansificio don’t even need to be certified as food production facilities. Yet the pomace oil industry is widely subsidized by the EU, as well as by the national governments of Spain, Italy, and other oil-producing countries. Pomace oil is used extensively in the food service industry and in many restaurants, as well as an ingredient in foods such as pizza, pasta sauces, and snack foods, where it is typically marketed as healthy-sounding “olive oil.” Pomace oil is commonly used to adulterate olive oil. It is widely sold in supermarkets, often in packaging that misleads customers into thinking they’re buying olive oil.
All this is to be expected, however, in a business where opaque and misleading labeling is the order of the day. Where the term “olive oil” doesn’t just mean the juice pressed from olives, but denotes a heavily refined concoction of low-grade oils which, like pomace oil, have been deodorized, deacidified, degummed, and the rest. Where “extra virgin olive oil,” which actually is (or should be) olive juice, sounds vaguely unnatural, as though it had been processed. Where high-sounding terms like “pure” and “light” mean oils that have been stripped of nearly all of their sensory qualities and health benefits. A business whose laws and regulations have been written for (and frequently by) olive oil industrialists, rarely with the interests of olive farmers or honest extra virgin producers in mind. Much less of consumers.
THE PANELtaste test is an integral part of EU and Italian law regarding olive oil, yet Italian authorities rarely perform it, and private citizens who attempt to apply the law do so at their own risk. Witness the case of Andreas März, a Swiss agronomist who for the last three decades has produced extra virgin oil at a farm called Balduccio in the hills outside Pistoia, not far from Florence. März has the bulky, permanently dirt-stained hands of a farmer, yet his exuberant handlebar mustache, weather-worn leather vest, and red neckerchief suggest a character from the Old West—a steamboat gambler, perhaps, or a Texas Ranger. “I’m a farmer, but not the usual, silent kind of farmer,” he says in Tuscan-accented Italian, breaking into German now and then for emphasis. Earnings from extra virgin olive oil are so meager that he’s always had to do other jobs. He has unloaded trucks and hired out to other farmers as a laborer; when the great frost of 1985 ravaged Tuscan groves and killed 90 percent of his trees, leaving him with a mortgage and three young children to feed, he even stooped to journalism. Four years later he founded his own German-language magazine, Merum, dedicated to Italian wine and olive oil, and began to write a series of articles which denounced the poor quality of olive oil bottled—though rarely made—in Italy. He described the investigations of the Guardia di Finanza in Puglia and elsewhere in southern Italy, and told how major international brands had been caught selling adulterated oil. And he repeatedly pointed out that many big Italian producers were breaking international law, labeling oils as extra virgin whose taste and aroma were far inferior to the legal requirements for the extra virgin grade.
In 2004, he began his own investigation. He bought thirty-one bottles of extra virgin oil in supermarkets throughout Germany, and sent them to Florence for testing by three highly trained taste panels. The results were unanimous. Only one of the thirty-one oils was actually extra virgin grade. Nine were virgin, a grade below extra virgin. The rest, including oils by Bertolli, Carapelli, Rubino, and other major Italian names, were adjudged to be lampante, and therefore legally unfit for human consumption.
A few months later, März published the results of the tests in Merum. Carapelli promptly filed civil and criminal suits against the Florence chamber of commerce, whose panels had done some of the tasting, as well as against the head of the chamber’s chemical analysis laboratory, Laura Mazzanti, and one of
the panel leaders, the distinguished agronomist Marco Mugelli, on charges of abuse of office and interference with industry and commerce. An Italian court eventually threw out the case, but when the exasperated chamber decided to sue Carapelli for damages, they received a telephone call from a high official in the ministry of agriculture who instructed them to drop their suit. They did, and opted to avoid similar controversies in the future by discontinuing their panel test activities on behalf of private parties. “As an act of intimidation, it worked perfectly,” Marco Mugelli says.
In December 2004, März published an interview with Mugelli in Merum. März began by summarizing the results of the 2004 tests. “Like the majority of supermarket extra virgins,” März wrote, “samples from the Carapelli oil factory, in Florence, were also judged to be inferior. The taste panels of the Florence Chamber of Commerce have determined that the Carapelli extra virgins are incorrectly labeled. Independently from the tasting done by experts of the Chamber of Commerce, the inferior quality of the Carapelli oils was confirmed by another official panel (ARPAT in Florence). And now the counterattack: instead of classifying its oils correctly, the Carapelli group, based in Florence, takes aim at the individual taster. . . . If the press is critical of the anarchy that reigns in the olive oil market, then it must be silenced, and the most effective way to do this is to intimidate the experts.”
März then asked Mugelli about the lawsuit which Carapelli had brought against him, and asked him to explain the existing laws governing olive oil quality, in particular EU Directive 796, passed in 2002, which sets out the most up-to-date quality requirements for each grade of oil.
