by Mueller, Tom
Since then Pasquali has made Villa Campestri a center of R&D and communication about fine oil. He’s hosted study groups and retreats for sensory scientists and other scholars from the University of Florence and the Culinary Institute of America, and has more research planned for the future. Guests at Villa Campestri enjoy a complete olive oil experience: guided tastings, mill and orchard tours, seminars on sensory science, massages with olive oil, and magnificent oil-based meals in the hotel restaurant. His daughter Gemma, who holds a PhD in agronomy, leads the seminars, often accompanied by her young children, including Pasquali’s newest grandchild, two-year-old Cosimo, after whom this year’s oil at Villa Campestri is named. “The children love tasting oil,” Pasquali says. “They seem to sense its innate goodness and healthfulness, perhaps because of the percentage of the linolenic acid in olive oil, which is just like mother’s milk, and is fundamental for its absorption in the intestine.”
By now we’re tasting the third oil, made at Villa Campestri. It’s a fierce oil: floridly fruity, brazenly bitter, lip-puckeringly pungent. I slurp some, then cough and hack like a character in The Magic Mountain. Pasquali smiles unblinkingly, with glistening lips.
Then he’s off on another of his carefully reasoned tangents: how to make money from oil. As he says, he loves the myth, poetry, and science of olive oil, but he remains an entrepreneur. “People don’t ask for free wine at a restaurant. Why should they expect free olive oil? Until premium olive oil becomes a profit center in restaurants, we producers will never make a fair living.” In his restaurant, he says, he charges €9 for a flight of three oils, and business is brisk. The Culinary Institute of America recently opened one of his oleoteche at its campus in Napa, California, and likewise charges for an oil experience. Pasquali says he aims to open another four oil bars soon, in Spain, Greece, Japan, and Singapore, and to use them as springboards to educate fifty top chefs around the world in the fine art of fine oil. “They’ll become opinion leaders, spokespeople for how real oil works.”
A door opens behind him, and his grandson Cosimo toddles in, his round cheeks pink from the cold. “Ciao nonno!” he chirps, leaning heavily on his grandfather’s leg. He sees our oil and reaches up for the nearest glass on the table, the potent Villa Campestri oil which bears his name. As Pasquali cups his hands under it to prevent it from falling, Cosimo brings the oil to his lips and gulps it.
He shakes his head as if he’s been slapped across the face, and coughs loudly, his eyes filling with tears. I think he’s going to cry—that he’s crying already. Then, still coughing, he chokes out a word: “Buono!” And he holds out the glass to his grandfather for more.
Pasquali’s expression shifts between pride, tenderness, and what can only be described as hope. For a moment, I think he may cry.
“Can you imagine a better opinion leader?” he says at last.
THE MODERN HISTORY of olive oil began shortly after World War II, when Ancel Keys, the Minnesota epidemiologist, visited hospitals in Naples, Madrid, and on the island of Crete. Keys found an incidence of coronary heart disease that was drastically lower than in America, though people in these places had recently suffered the extended dietary privations of wartime, while Americans had had access to a varied and plentiful food supply. Keys, who had developed the K ration for the US Army (“K” stands for “Keys”) and had recently concluded pioneering research on the physiology of human starvation, suspected that the root cause was the differing fat consumption of the two populations. Not so much the quantity of fat—paradoxically, he found that the Greeks and Italians actually had a moderate to high fat intake—but the type of fat they ate.
Spurred by his observations, Keys began an ambitious epidemiologic survey of traditional diets and lifestyles in Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan, and the United States, which was eventually called the Seven Countries Study. He concluded that the trouble was with saturated fat, and the correspondingly high levels of cholesterol in the blood, which clogged arteries and led to heart attacks and strokes. In countries like the US and Finland, where most fat came from saturated sources such as meat and dairy products, coronary heart disease was high, while in the Mediterranean, where fats came primarily from monounsaturated olive oil, people were comparatively free of heart disease. (In Japan, where the diet was low in fat of any kind, heart disease was likewise very low.) In a series of publications in the 1960s and 1970s culminating in a definitive volume on the subject, Seven Countries, published in 1980, Keys recommended that Americans (and everyone else who cared about heart health and longevity) reduce their fat intake to 30 percent or less of their total calories. He urged what he termed a “Mediterranean-style regime,” rich in vegetables, fruit, fish, bread, and pasta, with moderate amounts of dairy products and wine, and large quantities of olive oil. Keys had christened the Mediterranean diet, and put oil at its core.
Key’s work had unexpected and ironic consequences. The United States government, in large part prompted by his emphasis on low-fat diets, declared unconditional war on fat. In 1977, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs headed by Senator George McGovern drew up a set of strongly anti-fat dietary goals, which were echoed by the USDA and the National Institutes of Health in anti-fat recommendations of their own. A series of clinical tests followed, purporting to prove the causal links between fat intake and heart disease, as well as connecting fat with cancer and obesity. Initially, hard saturated fats were targeted, but in the press and the popular mind, the demonization of fat rapidly spread to anything containing fatty acids, even healthy monounsaturates like olive oil. Dietologists dreamed up low-fat diets and food companies churned out low-fat foods to fill them, gradually making “low-fat” a synonym for slimness and health, though these foods frequently contained unhealthy amounts of sugar and salt, and all too often encouraged people to eat more total calories than before. Eventually the message spread far beyond the United States, working its way into the eating habits of the developed world. Today, many people in various parts of the globe believe that fat, saturated or not, is the root of all dietary evil.
Yet in the three decades since America condemned fats, the scientific consensus behind this condemnation has collapsed. After hundreds of millions of dollars spent in clinical studies, and after countless billions more spent in government nutritional education programs and food marketing, there is no proof that eating fat causes pathologies like heart disease, cancer, and obesity. Though hydrogenated fats are unambiguously unhealthy, there is no firm evidence linking unsaturated fats with heart disease, and even with saturated fats the science is far from incontrovertible. There is no proof that fat causes cancer. And although fats do contain five more calories per gram than carbohydrates, the wholesale substitution of fats with carbohydrates widely mandated in America may actually have accelerated the spread of obesity; the number of obese Americans has climbed from 14 percent of the population in 1980, when America went on a low-fat diet, to 34 percent today. What’s more, fat plays many essential roles in the human body, and some researchers believe that reducing lipid intake may impair a range of functions including metabolism, cell membrane permeability, and neural transmission (the brain is 70 percent fat).
The current state of science regarding dietary fat was summed up by Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, in his critique of the USDA’s “Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010,” which still recommends that Americans limit their fat intake to 35 percent of total calories. “There is really no basis for setting an upper limit on total fat,” Willett wrote. Nevertheless, after decades of well-intentioned misinformation, fats of all kinds are still widely considered taboo. Olive oil, the healthiest fat of all and the crux of the Mediterranean diet, remains in nutritional and psychological limbo for many people.
While Ancel Keys was observing hospital patients in Crete and Italy and attempting to frame the debate about olive oil and fat, oil-makers and lawmakers in Europe and ar
ound the Mediterranean were gradually forging the modern language of oil. In 1959, the United Nations founded the International Olive Oil Council (since renamed the International Olive Council, or IOC), an intergovernmental agency composed of eighteen olive-growing and oil-producing countries from around the Mediterranean, whose purpose was to supply financial and technical assistance to growers and millers, fund research in oil quality and chemistry, and promote olive oil consumption throughout the world. Additional help for the industry came from the central European government, which began to take shape shortly after World War II in order to promote cooperation among member nations, thus making “war unthinkable and materially impossible,” as Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, said. Agricultural policy was a central part of this new unity: to ensure adequate and reliable food supplies in war-torn Europe, leaders created a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with generous subsides, incentives, and price guarantees to farmers. Olive farmers and oil-makers benefited from CAP aid, first in Italy, a founding member of the European Economic Community, and later in Greece, Spain, and other member states as they joined the EEC (which became the EU in 1993). European subsidies on olive oil continue to this day.
In addition to safeguarding the quantity of olive oil produced, Europe and the IOC also began, in the late 1950s, to address a growing qualitative divide among olive oils. While oil refineries remained widespread and profitable, and most producers continued to make oil with old-fashioned grindstones, mats, and presses as their ancestors had for centuries, new technology for olive crushing, malaxing, and centrifuging of the sort pioneered in Puglia by the De Carlo family had begun to produce increasingly high-quality oil, made quickly and efficiently from fresh olives. The gulf in taste and nutrition between refined oil, old-fashioned pressed oil and this new premier oil widened steadily, yet no sharp legal distinction existed between the bland, the bad, and the beautiful. Finally, on November 13, 1960, the European Parliament passed a groundbreaking law on olive oil quality, which created several new oil grades. The highest of these had an odd-sounding name, with overtones of science and religious mystery: extra virgin. The law stipulated that extra virgin oil be made solely by mechanical methods, without chemical treatment, and set a number of chemical requirements, including a maximum of 1 percent free acidity. The law also announced that such oil “must not demonstrate disgusting odors such as rancidity, putridity, smoke, mould, olive fly and similar,” though how these tastes were to be determined, or by whom, was not specified. Extra virginity was born, but the means for determining it were still lacking.
The task of creating a scientific taste test for olive oil was taken up by the IOC. Starting with a seminal tasting method developed in the early 1980s by the National Organization of Olive Oil Tasters, an olive oil school based in Imperia, Italy, a small team of chemists and sensory scientists from Italy and Spain immersed themselves in olive oil for two decades of painstaking experimentation, during which they identified the various flaws in taste and aroma which can arise in oil, and codified a rigorous and reproducible tasting protocol to determine the quality grade of an olive oil. The resulting IOC taste methodology, together with a set of chemical requirements, became the basis of a new EU olive oil law, passed in 1991 and, with some modifications, still in force today: to be called extra virgin, an oil must have zero taste flaws and some perceptible fruitiness (pepperiness and bitterness are also identified as positive attributes). With this law, olive oil became the first food in the world—and to this day one of a mere handful—whose quality was legally determined at least in part by its taste. The chemical limits for the extra virgin grade, though stricter than the original 1960 standards—the level of free acidity, for example, was lowered to 0.8 percent—were still loose, but the legal taste test appeared to promise a new seriousness in fostering olive oil excellence.
The mid-1990s were a high point for the IOC. Production boomed in many parts of the Mediterranean, and as new extraction technology spread, oil quality rose rapidly. The IOC recognized and coordinated a growing number of taste panels throughout the Mediterranean, regularly subjecting them to strict ring tests to verify their abilities and disqualifying panels that failed the tests. The IOC’s executive director, Fausto Luchetti, a charismatic entrepreneur and member of a family of distinguished Italian diplomats, led promotional campaigns in a number of countries outside the EU, which successfully spread the message about olive oil’s culinary and nutritional benefits. “The work of the IOC under Fausto Luchetti helped put olive oil on the map in Australia,” says Paul Miller, president of the Australian Olive Association. “They created a critical mass of public awareness, and paved the way for the popularity that olive oil now enjoys in this country.”
For all the successes of oil in the 1990s, these years were also a high-water mark for olive oil crime. Generous EU subsidies on olive oil encouraged widespread fraud in many olive-producing nations, particularly in Italy, the historic heart of the oil trade, where in many areas the entire production chain became, in effect, one huge criminal network, with farmers overstating the quantity of olives they picked, millers inflating the amount of oil they produced, and companies exaggerating the number of bottles they sold. Even olive oil unions got caught up in the scam, pocketing large sums and building lush headquarters in Rome, while neglecting the olive growers and oil-makers they nominally represented. In the mid- to late 1990s, olive oil became one of the most frequently adulterated agricultural products in the EU, leading OLAF, the European anti-fraud office, to set up a special olive oil task force. Domenico Seccia, the investigative magistrate in Bari who prosecuted Domenico Ribatti and Leonardo Marseglia, wrote a book, Olive Oil Fraud in the European Union, which described the illegal consortia of oil producers, oil traders, banks, and food companies that had formed to reap the dual rewards of oil adulteration and European subsidies, and detailed investigative techniques for detecting and disbanding these networks. In olive oil fraud, an EU investigator told me, “profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks.” Widespread adulteration and huge supplies of refined olive oil fueled a price war, which forced even the largest oil companies like Unilever and Nestlé to seek ever cheaper sources of oil, with the risk of purchasing and reselling, knowingly or not, adulterated products themselves. While the quality of estate olive oils soared, supermarket extra virgins plummeted.
This quality divide between true extra virgins and industrial oil eventually split the IOC. According to its charter, the council was responsible for promoting all grades of olive oil. Yet as the quality gap between real extra virgins and lesser oils widened, producers of high-quality oil demanded more recognition for the extra virgin grade. At the same time, large olive oil companies with substantial sales in refined blends and supermarket extra virgins showed less and less enthusiasm for the IOC’s taste test protocol, especially after it was written into EU law and could be used to exclude low-grade oils from the extra virgin category. Through lobbyists and direct participation in EU committees, these same large companies played an important role in formulating EU policy on olive oil, and exerted considerable influence on the IOC itself, since 80 percent of the IOC operating budget was supplied by the EU.
The crisis came in 2002. Fausto Luchetti was accused by the EU of mismanaging IOC funds, and resigned from the council. (The case is still being heard in a Madrid court.) Luchetti denies all charges against him, which he says were part of a scheme by certain high-level EU functionaries to divert funds from olive oil promotion by the IOC and channel them into the promotion of seed oils from northern Europe. His friend Flavio Zaramella, who followed the events closely, blames olive oil industrialists instead: “The big industry players wanted him out,” Zaramella says. In any event, after Luchetti’s departure the EU slashed IOC funding, severely curtailing the council’s ability to carry on olive oil research and promotion. The funding cut also hamstrung the IOC’s network of taste panels, since the council no longer had the money to perform ring test
s on its recognized panels to verify their accuracy. The IOC remains a repository of invaluable experience and expertise, and its scientific brain trust still boasts some of the preeminent oil chemists in the world, like Lafranco Conte. But today this once-progressive organization, which invented a revolutionary new definition of olive oil quality and spread the gospel of good oil in many parts of the world, all too often helps to hold extra virgin quality to the lowest common denominator, protecting the interests of Big Oil rather than helping producers of genuine extra virgins—much less consumers.
ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2010, an eclectic group of chemists, chefs, sensory scientists, musicians, culinary visionaries, and quality control engineers from seven countries gathered in Verona, Italy, at a three-day conference called Beyond Extra Virgin, to discuss the future of olive oil. It was a historic moment for extra virgin oil. The Mediterranean diet, built on a shining foundation of olive oil, had just become part of UNESCO’s Cultural Heritage of Mankind, and the extra virgin grade, created in 1960, was about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday. Yet the enthusiasm of the participants was tempered by moments of somberness, even of disorientation, as they realized how little they themselves actually knew about great olive oil, and how hard it would be to communicate the truth about oil to the world.
Speakers explored the mysteries of extra virginity in many ways. Harold McGee, the noted American writer on food chemistry, showed eye-popping slides of futuristic olive oil dishes made by trendsetting chefs like Ferran Adrià, the mad genius from Catalonia, who has formed a research group to devise unique new extra virgin edibles: oil-filled spheres of alginate that look like fish roe, which Adrià calls “olive oil caviar,” and olive oil foam made from tapioca maltodextrin, a fine powder which absorbs the oil and liquefies in the mouth, like room-temperature ice cream. Luis Rallo Romero, professor of pomology at the University of Córdoba, described rare Spanish olive cultivars conserved in his plasma bank which most people in the audience had never heard of, which were rapidly disappearing from agriculture, together with their unique-tasting oils. Paolo Pasquali of the Villa Campestri compared the impact of oil on our senses of taste and smell to that of music on the ears, observing that oil produced the same progression of attack, decay, sustain, and release known to sound engineers, and virtuoso composer Luca di Volo and his ensemble interpreted olive oil’s fruity, peppery, and bitter notes on violins and saxophones. In perhaps the most thought-provoking presentation of the three-day conference, sensory scientist Erminio Monteleone from the University of Florence described recent blind taste tests he’d conducted in Helsinki and Florence, during which consumers tried three oils and expressed clear preferences, yet often reversed these preferences when the same oils were served with food. “Olive oil combines chemically and kinesthetically with food, changing both itself and the food,” Monteleone said, “so we can properly assess an oil only when we taste it in a dish.”
