by Mueller, Tom
Back in nineteenth-century Italy, trading companies sprang up to finance the bold gambles of millions of Italians who emigrated to the Americas. One such company was the Francesco Bertolli Bank and Exchange, founded by Francesco Bertolli in Lucca in 1875. Soon after his first clients arrived in the United States, they began to send him postcards with greetings to him and his family, and plaintive requests for a crate or two of olive oil, the flavor of their homeland. Bertolli complied, and by the 1890s was making more money in olive oil than in finance. His oil business spread from New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago westward across the US and south into Latin America, assuaging the culinary homesickness of countless Mediterranean immigrants. Francesco Bertolli’s son Giulio opened the Brazilian market by traveling on muleback from village to village in the Minas Gerais region, carrying a supply of sorghum brooms and olive oil. At first he sold the brooms and gave a tin of oil free with each purchase; within six months he had abandoned brooms entirely, and was selling ever-growing quantities of olive oil.
FOR TWAIN, bogus olive oil and fake butter symbolized the growing artificiality of American life, and he considered the people who made and sold them to be the epitome of the slick riverboat grifters that often crop up in his fiction. In fact, cottonseed oil manufacturers had found a crafty way to spin straw into gold: in 1894, Popular Science Monthly observed that cottonseed had been garbage in 1860, fertilizer in 1870, cattle feed in 1880, and “table food and many things else” in 1890. Actually, Popular Science was behind the times: already in 1879, knowingly or unknowingly, humans as well as cattle were eating large amounts of cottonseed oil. In that year alone, 73,782 barrels of the stuff left the port of New Orleans for Europe, and the transatlantic flow increased in the coming decades. Much of it went into oleomargarine, invented eleven years earlier by French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, which quickly spread, and was spread, throughout America. By the time Mark Twain overheard the two beaters gloating on the Mississippi steamboat, fifteen margarine plants were operating in America, which between them had an estimated $7 million in sales—almost $10 billion in today’s dollars.
Not all of the cottonseed oil exports from New Orleans went into margarine, however. Over half of the 1879 shipment was destined for Italy, where it was widely used to adulterate olive oil. The British consul in Livorno reported that oil merchants frequently topped up olive oil flasks with cottonseed oil, and the Atlanta Constitution sardonically noted that Italian oil makers increased their output by setting a cask of cottonseed oil at the foot of every tree.
Butter and olive oil substitutes converged, as more and more margarine producers replaced the animal fat in their wares with less expensive cottonseed oil, and later with other cheap vegetable oils—corn, sunflower, peanut, colza, rape. These products became edible thanks to recent chemical and technological breakthroughs in vegetable oil refining, which allowed food manufacturers to decolorize, deodorize, and otherwise denature what had previously been unpalatable if not downright revolting substances, fit only for making soap, greasing axles, burning in lamps, and feeding hogs. Hydrogenation soon followed, which turned liquid oils into semisolid pastes at room temperature and paved the way for still wider use of vegetable oils in margarine and many other foods.
No wonder Mark Twain’s two beaters were gloating in 1883, at the prospect of reaping ever fatter margins on cheap, easy-to-make butter and olive oil substitutes. Yet for industrial and political reasons, the two businesses faced very different futures. The powerful farm lobby, recognizing that margarine represented a serious threat to the dairy farmer’s livelihood, took up butter’s cause. They objected to margarine’s being labeled with alluring terms like “refined butter” and “pure butter,” and complained that dishonest shopkeepers were cutting their butter with cheap margarine. The fierce legal battle which ensued, lasting over a century, saw the butter lobby seeking to limit the ability of margarine-makers to compete with butter, while the margarine lobby fought each of these measures under the banners of free speech, free enterprise, defense of the poor—and by arguing that margarine was healthier than butter. States began to legislate against margarine; in 1881, Missouri outlawed the manufacture, sale, or possession of margarine with intent to sell, while other states forbade coloring margarine yellow to resemble butter, or even required that it be dyed pink.
Congressional hearings on margarine began in the early 1880s and continued through 1950. In 1886, Congress enacted a Margarine Act, slapping stiff taxes and restrictions on margarines; when he signed the act into law, President Grover Cleveland remarked that one of its main benefits was “the defense accorded the consumer against the fraudulent substitution and sale of an imitation of the genuine article of food of very general use. I venture to say that hardly a pound of oleomargarine ever entered a poor man’s home under its real name and in its real character.” Around the turn of the century, the Supreme Court heard several cases concerning margarine. “We need insistent recognition of the fact of the interdependence of the human animal upon his cattle,” Herbert Hoover intoned. “The white race can not survive without its dairy products and no child can be developed on short or bad milk supply.” The world wars and butter rationing boosted the margarine industry, but strong limits remained on the way the product could be marketed and sold: through the 1950s, federal taxes remained in effect on the product, and in many states margarine could only be sold as a white block, with a pellet of yellow coloring that the consumer had to knead in. In Wisconsin it was still illegal to sell yellow margarine until 1968, and in Quebec, the substance was only legalized in 2008, after Unilever brought suit against the provincial government.
No American president or Supreme Court justice ever spoke in defense of authentic olive oil, however. The industry had no powerful special interest to defend it, just a few small-scale producers in California and a crowd of highly competitive east coast importers who all too often were cashing in on fake oil themselves. Hence the adulteration of olive oil with cottonseed and other vegetable oils went largely unchallenged. Already in 1863, the New England Journal of Medicine reported as “a well-known fact that the olive oil sold in America and elsewhere is very seldom pure, but mostly adulterated with other cheap vegetable oils,” such as beechnut, poppy, sesame, and peanut oils. Two decades later, reporting the conversation he’d overheard between the two traveling salesmen, Mark Twain described the pervasive use of cottonseed oil to cut olive oil. In 1903, an investigation by the US Department of Agriculture revealed that adulteration continued apace, even in domestic oils: “The inspection of home-made oils has been so loose that cottonseed is put in here at home without paying freight twice across the Atlantic,” the department’s inspectors reported. Olive oil adulteration helped prompt the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, a groundbreaking federal law that aimed to remove adulterated foods, poisonous drugs, and harmful patent medicines from commerce, and that gave the Food and Drug Administration new prominence and authority. Yet the trade in bogus olive oil continued undisturbed: in 1922, two years into Prohibition, US Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland observed that “there is more profit in adulterating olive oil than there is in bootlegging. The practice of adulterating this oil has grown until it has become a menace to the honest importers in the trade.” Continued testing by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, and later by the FDA, revealed extensive adulteration in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, not only by oil importers but also by certain California producers themselves. In the late 1990s, having failed to halt oil adulteration, the FDA stopped testing for it.
Despite enduring problems with fraud, the olive oil market in America is large and fast-growing, and shows encouraging signs of renewal. Olive bars are opening at high-end locations like the Culinary Institute of America in Napa and Eataly NYC, the hyperdeli on Fifth Avenue, as well as at a growing number of delicatessens and food stores which source and sell high-quality oils. Olive oil franchises like Oil & Vinegar and W
e Olive have opened in eighteen states, and excellent online resources have emerged, like the Olive Oil Times (www.oliveoiltimes.com) and the Olive Oil Source (www.oliveoilsource.com). Large oil companies, which traditionally have produced oils with a limited number of taste profiles, are beginning to pay attention to different cultivars and terroirs. In late 2011, Colavita USA will introduce a new line of regional oils made from olives grown on estates in California, Australia, Spain, and Greece, each oil distinctively packaged to highlight its unique flavors and aromas. “I’m not retiring!” John J. Profaci, the company’s seventy-four-year-old founder and chairman, says of the initiative. “I’m excited. It’s like I’m starting all over again.”
The regulatory environment is also evolving. In October 2010, the USDA finally updated the previous trade standard for olive oil, which dated from 1948, thereby replacing quaint, Truman-era terms like “choice,” “fancy,” and “superior” with terminology and chemical requirements that follow IOC guidelines. The California Olive Oil Council and the North American Olive Oil Association, two trade groups, are taking active part in the debate about quality. Perhaps most significantly, the three-year-old Olive Center at the University of California, Davis, is becoming a vital forum for chemical, sensorial, agronomic, and nutritional knowledge about olives and oil. America, it seems, is developing an appetite for good oil.
What’s more, though the US currently imports 98 percent of its olive oil, within its borders lies a production area of enormous potential. If olive trees could choose where to sink roots and grow fruit, many would move to California. The state is the fifth largest agricultural economy on earth for very good reason: everything grows here, in reckless profusion, four hundred crops including more than half the national production of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Olives, highly adapted to hot, dry climates, thrive here. In fact, they’ve been cultivated in California since Spanish missionaries began to grow their “mission” olives here in the seventeenth century. But in the last fifteen years, Californians have started to get serious about making first-quality oil, using varying degrees of Silicon Valley innovation and old-fashioned farming grit. “The California olive oil industry’s relationship to the Mediterranean is a little like a child to a parent,” says Alexandra Kicenik Devarenne, an independent olive oil consultant and educator based in Petaluma. “At first we adopted Mediterranean practices—and prejudices—without questioning them, but now we’re maturing and becoming more like teenagers, with that uneasy mix of rebellion and reliance.” Like pioneers in other fields, many California oil women and men have strong, independent personalities. Despite their common trade they often mistrust, and sometimes detest, one another. But each, in very different ways, shares a uniquely American ambition: to be the best at what they do.
DINO CORTOPASSI always dreamed of being a farmer, though his father, who immigrated from Italy in the 1920s and worked through the Depression on minimal wages, tried hard to talk him out of it. As a child Cortopassi made toy tractors out of cleats and toy disks out of old valve springs, and used them to farm his sandbox. His heroes were farmers, like his great-grandfather Serafino, a sharecropper in the hills near Lucca who saw a grain thresher at an agricultural fair around 1855, took out a loan to buy two of them, and eventually made enough money to buy land and raise his family out of poverty. As Cortopassi grew he developed a farmer’s build—six foot three, barrel-chested and long-armed—and seemed cut out for the trade. But in his senior year in high school he caught rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart, and doctors ruled out farming or manual labor for two to three years. “I felt like I’d been dealt some bad cards,” he remembers. “But sometimes the worst breaks turn out to be the best ones.”
Cortopassi grew up in Stockton, in California’s Central Valley, in an Italian environment where people bought cars, bread, and insurance from Italians, and most spoke the Genoese dialect which his mother’s family used. (His father, who was from Lucca, learned genovese to fit in.) Cortopassi was sitting at home nursing his heart, longing for the farming he couldn’t do and watching friends go off to college, when a family friend suggested he try the two-year agriculture program at UC Davis, sixty miles away. Cortopassi jumped at the chance—sort of. “Actually, I majored in poker. But poker gave me the skills I needed to set myself up in agriculture later on: numbers and probabilities, discipline, money management, and how to judge people. Above all it taught me how important it was to get an edge, and when you got one, to ride it hard. If I ever write the book of my life, that’ll be the title: Getting an Edge.”
Cortopassi has wavy, iron-gray hair and black, expressive eyebrows, the head of a nineteenth-century Italian statesman set, incongruously, on the body of a lumberjack. He is frequently in the company of Tank, his equally barrel-chested Labrador, and his conversation is loud and fast, peppered with splendid obscenities and genuine life wisdom. In 2005 Cortopassi received the prestigious Horatio Alger award for his rags-to-riches success story, and he and his wife, Joan, spend a substantial part of their time and money helping inner-city kids in nearby Stockton and Lodi. The rest of his energies are directed at fine-tuning the family business for maximum efficiency. “He’s constantly experimenting with different methods, always asking ‘Why? Why? Why?’” says Brady Whitlow, his son-in-law, who runs the family olive oil operation. “He pushes us pretty hard.”
Cortopassi found his first edge in agriculture shortly after graduating from UC Davis, when he took a job with a grain trading company, Pillsbury, and began driving his white VW throughout the Central Valley to buy grain from farmers. His heart gradually healed, and as he traveled the farm countryside he became convinced he could compete in farming. He didn’t have the money to buy land, so he began renting, and by double-cropping winter wheat together with kidney beans he started turning a profit. “People said I was crazy, that beans planted so late would get rained out, which was the risk I ran each year. Sometimes they did, and that was like a bad beat in Texas hold ’em. But more often, I made money while everyone else was just getting by.” Soon he was purchasing less productive land, which he levelled and improved.
His next big edge came in tomatoes, in the early 1960s, when, like his great-grandfather Serafino, he caught wind of a new machine, this time for harvesting tomatoes, just as a labor crisis broke out because of a shortage of hand-pickers. While other tomato farmers were pulling out their crops, Cortopassi invested heavily in the new technology, and eventually became one of the biggest tomato canners in the state. He continued diversifying in a range of successful row crops and tree fruits, as well as grapes and kidney beans; at one time he was the largest producer of kidney beans in the world.
Finally, in 2004, Cortopassi tackled olives. He was flying over California near the town of Gridley, the location of California Olive Ranch, the largest olive producer in the state which used the recently invented super-high-density (SHD) system. In traditional olive groves, where the fruit is picked by hand or with simple rakes or shaking devices, the trees are planted at about 100 to the acre; SHD groves, by contrast, pack in 700 trees or more per acre, set in straight hedgerows like grapes or corn. SHD olives are collected by twenty-foot-tall mechanical harvesters that ride over the rows, engulfing tree after tree, gobbling up the fruit and spitting it through a chute into a trailer paralleling it one hedgerow over.
“When I saw those groves I said, ‘Goddamn son of a bitch, Cortopassi, this is it! This is ‘the edge’ in olives! But I gotta know more! I gotta know the costs!’” He and a team of coworkers chartered a Flexijet and took a rapid tour of areas in Spain where the SHD system had been pioneered. “I wanted to talk to the farmers themselves,” Cortopassi says. “Farmers talking to farmers, they’ll level with you.” Having convinced himself that the SHD system had competitive advantages over conventional methods of olive production, Cortopassi threw himself into the business with characteristic decisiveness, eventually planting 1,200 acres of olive trees and building a high-tech mill with a throughput of 250 tons of ol
ives a day.
Today the Corto Olive company, managed by Brady Whitlow, makes about 600,000 gallons of first-rate extra virgin olive oil a year. The trees, nine feet tall and planted in die-straight lines like dwarf cypresses, have lost their poetry, but the entire operation sparkles with efficiency and runs day and night. Seeing a gigantic harvester move down a row in the dark, floodlit and clanking like a mechanized cavalry unit, makes you think about the olive harvest very differently. Some competitors object that the handful of cultivars suited to SHD are specialized clones which can’t produce the wide range of oil styles made with traditional olive-growing methods. Others say that arbequina, the most popular SHD cultivar, is low in oleic acid, polyphenols, and flavor. “It’s the Pink Chablis of olive oil,” one small producer told me.
When I repeated this to Brady Whitlow, he shrugged. “Look, it’s early days for this system, and we’re still learning. Many other agricultural innovations you see in California took a few years to get themselves sorted out, then took off. Besides, we’re trying to compete in taste with the supermarket oils, the Bertollis and Carapellis of this world, and we’re already doing that very well.” He handed me a cup of fresh, jade-green Corto oil, which made his point better than any words could.
All that’s missing is profitability. When I asked Dino Cortopassi about his margins, he made a sour face. “Thanks to European labeling fraud there’s no level playing field in this industry, and it’s tough to compete with the prices of inferior oils camouflaged as extra virgin. But our product, real olive oil, makes other things taste better, and the center of the plate is always the center of the consumer’s consciousness. Eventually we’ll win the olive oil game, on the basis of superior taste at reasonable prices.”
