by Mueller, Tom
Stutsman’s faith appears misplaced. NAOOA members include ASSITOL itself, as well as Krinos and Bertolli, which have had problems with faux olive or pomace oil in the past. Therefore, the NAOOA may not always be the most objective source of information about fraud—it is, after all, a trade organization, not a regulatory agency. Nevertheless, the NAOOA is the only body in America that performs widespread oil testing, and it regularly notifies the FDA and other federal and state authorities when test results point to fraud. According to a letter recently sent by the NAOOA to the FDA, in April 2010 the NAOOA analyzed samples of Genco Extra Virgin Olive Oil (evidently named after the olive oil company in The Godfather), which is marketed by Coachella Valley Edibles in Rancho Cucamonga, a suburb of Los Angeles. These tests revealed that the product was adulterated with cheaper oils. The NAOOA writes that it performed similar tests in 2005 and 2007, with similar results. “That means that for at least five years this company has demonstrated a pattern of defrauding consumers,” the letter concludes, “and robbing them of the health benefits outlined in FDA’s health claim for olive oil and olive oil–containing products.” The NAOOA has written similar letters regarding other companies. It sent the FDA test results regarding extra virgin oil produced by Gourmet Factory, a company in Glendale, New York, showing that the product actually consisted mostly of pomace oil; the letter ends with a request that the FDA “take whatever action possible to protect consumers and legitimate businesses from these unscrupulous practices.” The NAOOA has also written to the Orange County district attorney to report the activities of Italcal Trading (also known as Gemsa Enterprises), based in La Mirada, another suburb of Los Angeles. The letter cites six of the company’s labels, including Di Stefano olive oil, La Dolce Vita extra virgin oil, and Angela extra virgin oil, which, it says, its tests reveal “to actually contain large amounts of seed oil,” and urges the district attorney “to actively pursue an investigation of Italcal Trading.”
Other sources report adulteration by Italcal Trading. Mustafa Altuner and other Los Angeles oil companies have had this company’s olive oil products analyzed by reputable laboratories, with test results that point to adulteration with cheaper oils. Mike Bradley has done the same, especially because Italcal was the Los Angeles-based oil dealer from whom he bought the eighty drums of organic oil, part of which appeared from later testing to have been adulterated. A former employee of Italcal, who is currently in dispute with the company, reports having observed extensive adulteration by the company. He claims that Italcal systematically lied about the nature and origins of the oils it sold, and ignored traceability and other procedures required by the FDA. He speaks of a worker in the Italcal warehouse, whom he nicknamed “the gondolier,” who he says blended up adulterated oils using a five-foot metal paddle, adding a coloring agent procured by the head of the company, Emilio Viscomi. Viscomi kept the recipe for the agent a closely guarded secret. “You want it greener, less green?” the former employee said. “You want it emerald green? However you want it, that’s how he makes it.” The employee also describes Italcal’s illustrious client list, which he says included some of the leading food distribution companies in America, who he claims must have known the true nature of the “olive oil” they were buying, given that it was being sold at far below the market price of olive oil.
I attempted to contact Emilio Viscomi, head of Italcal, numerous times by phone and email to request an interview, but he never replied. I even dropped by unannounced at the Italcal warehouse in La Mirada, where the receptionist told me Viscomi had just stepped out; I asked if I could speak with someone else at the company, or tour the warehouse, but she cordially refused. So I can’t say how Viscomi would respond to the charges of his former employee, or the claims of the NAOOA and other oil traders who say he sells fake olive oil. I can say, though, that while sitting in the parking lot of the Italcal warehouse, a series of tractor-trailer trucks with the names of prominent American food companies painted on their sides pulled up to the truck bay, loaded goods, and drove away. These were the same names that the former employee of Italcal said had purchased the company’s products, and the same that Mike Bradley painstakingly documented during his investigations—companies which, as both men point out, can hardly be ignorant of the real nature of the product they are buying.
So far, however, despite repeated reports from the NAOOA and independent oil businessmen, neither the FDA nor other authorities appear to have taken action against reputed oil fraudsters. What’s more, the FDA has performed its own tests in the past, with results that have been far from reassuring. David Firestone, an FDA chemist from 1948 to 1999 who acted as the agency’s olive oil specialist, instituted a survey program in 1983 to curb what he calls “the rampant adulteration of olive oil products” in America. Of twenty-five products collected at random, nearly half were adulterated; two years later, a follow-up survey of sixty-one olive oil products found 32 percent adulteration. Some of the adulterated products were by major producers, whose names Fire-stone would not reveal. “My experience over a period of some fifty years suggests that we can always expect adulteration and mislabeling of olive oil products in the absence of surveillance by official sources,” he says. More recently, in 1997, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Canada’s answer to the FDA, began testing retail olive oils for adulteration; since then, over 20 percent of the oils it has tested have proven to be fraudulent. Today in the US, where oil companies know there is no systematic testing, the incidence of fraud is surely higher.
The FDA’s Martin Stutsman says his agency is hesitant to commit the resources to fighting olive oil adulteration because such activity, though wrong, doesn’t represent a serious public health hazard. This too is debatable. True, olive oil mixed with a cheaper vegetable oil doesn’t compare in danger or virulence to anthrax, botulism, or salmonella. Yet how many people with a peanut or soybean allergy have become sick after eating olive oil adulterated with peanut or soy oil? Italian investigators have found hydrocarbon residues, pesticides, and other contaminants in fake olive oils, and pomace oil, a common adulterant, sometimes contains mineral oil as well as PAHs, proven carcinogens that can also damage DNA and the immune system. Then there’s the 1981 case of toxic oil syndrome in Spain, when rapeseed oil adulterated with an industrial additive, sold as olive oil, killed eight hundred people and seriously injured thousands more.
In 2008, Mike Bradley imported organic extra virgin olive oil in a flexi-bag, a 24,000-liter polymer bladder which, when filled, looks like a small green whale. When it arrived, Bradley’s quality assurance team discovered that the oil had a peculiar chemical odor, and refused to unload it. The producer insisted that the odor hadn’t been there when he’d loaded the oil, while the shipping company denied all knowledge and demanded that the container be returned empty. Bradley declined, and, despite growing late fees for the container, consulted prominent chemical laboratories and flexi-bag manufacturers to try to determine the source of the problem. He eventually found that the oil, as well as the paint on the inside of the container, was contaminated with naphthalene, a pesticide that is the active ingredient in mothballs; the oil had 390,000 times the allowable limit. The container had evidently been sprayed for insects before an earlier shipment, and the insecticide had passed from the container through the plastic membrane of the flexi-bag, contaminating the oil. Bradley called health officials at the state and federal level to report the incident and ask what to do with the oil, but they told him they had no jurisdiction over imported products, and instructed him to take the issue elsewhere. Despite numerous attempts, he was unable to locate an agency anywhere in America that was willing to deal with the problem. Finally, in frustration, Bradley alerted health authorities that he was about to release the load of contaminated olive oil, still inside its original container, back to the shipping company, and that he would not be responsible for the consequences. The next day, he says, federal, state, and county officials arrived at his warehouse en masse. One read Brad
ley his rights, while others placed the container and its contents under embargo. Over six months later, the container and its contents were transported under state supervision to a refinery, where all traces of naphthalene were removed. (Final liability and responsibility for the incident are still being decided in a suit between Bradley’s insurance company and the shipping company, being heard in a court in Tel Aviv, Israel.)
Instead of facing such complications, some dealers in this situation might have let the smell of the tainted oil fade, mixed it with good oil and sold the resulting blend without a word to the authorities. Many others wouldn’t have caught the problem in the first place, especially if the level of contamination hadn’t been so high. “As far as I know, the practice of treating empty containers with naphthalene continues, and the flexi-bags that most importers of olive oil use don’t prevent this kind of contamination,” Bradley says. “Which is alarming, when you realize that millions of tons of produce and foodstuffs move in ocean containers that have been treated inside with pesticides, and that neither shippers, receivers, nor the government officials I spoke with were aware of the potential problem.” Bradley sees this incident as symptomatic of a widespread mistrust of official supervision. “People have been brainwashed into believing that all government regulation and oversight hamper free enterprise, and are the bane of industry. They aren’t willing to pay the up-front cost of effective vigilance.”
In fact, the FDA is itself the victim of a generalized bias against government regulation. The same laissez-faire attitudes lamented by Jonathan Swift, which helped turn Britain after the Industrial Revolution into a haven for adulteration, have undermined the agency’s ability to protect the US food supply. In November 2007, in an internal review of the agency, the FDA’s own Subcommittee on Science and Technology decried the “appallingly low inspection rate” of US food:
FDA cannot sufficiently monitor either the tremendous volume of products manufactured domestically or the exponential growth of imported products. During the past 35 years, the decrease in FDA funding for inspection of our food supply has forced FDA to impose a 78 percent reduction in food inspections, at a time when the food industry has been rapidly expanding and food importation has exponentially increased. FDA estimates that, at most, it inspects food manufacturers once every 10 years, and cosmetic manufacturers even less frequently. The Agency conducts no inspections of retail food establishments or of food-producing farms.
“FDA does not have the capacity to ensure the safety of food for the nation,” the report concluded. “FDA’s inability to keep up with scientific advances means that American lives are at risk.”
There are signs that this risk is being addressed. In 2009, President Barack Obama formed a Food Safety Working Group to advise him on how to upgrade the US food safety system. In late 2010, after a series of food poisoning incidents involving eggs, spinach, and peanut butter, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed new food safety bills that aimed to expand the FDA’s powers to inspect and recall tainted foods. For olive oil authenticity, help may be on the way from the private sector as well. In August 2010, responding to the UC Davis study that reported widespread mislabeling in the extra virgin grade, the Orange County law firm of Callahan & Blaine filed a class action complaint against the manufacturers and distributors of many of the oils cited in the study, including Unilever, Carapelli, and Sysco. The complaint accused these companies of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, false advertising, breach of warranty, and unjust enrichment, and of “misleading and defrauding California consumers for years.” (Callahan & Blaine later decided not to pursue the case.) Mustafa Altuner says that, at least in Los Angeles, the atmosphere in the oil business appears to be improving. “Right now the bad guys are sleeping with one eye open.”
Yet so far nothing concrete has actually been done to strengthen the FDA, and no arrests have been made in the olive oil business. The bad guys may be resting a little less easy, but they’re still blending up bad oil.
Epilogue
MYTHOLOGIES
Are we witnessing a renaissance in olive oil, or the death of an industry? Will extra virgin olive oil become the next premium food phenomenon—the next microbrewery beer, Starbucks coffee, or quality chocolate—or will it sink into the anonymous mass of fat that is the legacy of our post-industrial food supply? Why don’t we respect great oil as we respect great wine? And why have oil and wine evolved in such fundamentally divergent ways over the last half-century?
For several years now I’ve been asking these questions of people I’ve met in orchards, restaurants, monasteries, warehouses, and courthouses, in places farther and farther from my home in Italy, where my questioning began. Some of their responses—guesses and musings rather than answers—make up this book. In many of my conversations, wine, oil’s age-old companion and rival, has been the unspoken point of comparison. Recently, back in western Liguria where I live, I saw how the enduring dialectic with wine may, if not explain the enigma of oil, at least provide clues to oil’s real nature. I learned this from my neighbor Gino Olivieri, an eighty-five-year-old farmer who is the wisest man I know, as I watched him make oil and wine amid the terraced fields and limestone cliffs of our village.
Each year I help Olivieri with two ancient rites of the fall: gathering in the wine grapes and the olives. From the beginning, I’ve been struck by the differences in these two activities, and in Olivieri’s underlying attitudes toward wine and oil. We harvest the wine grapes in late September, and the whole Olivieri clan turns out, including distant cousins who rarely see each other during the year. It’s easy, jolly, companionable work; the warm autumn sun shines green through the fat leaves, and swarms of fruit flies and wasps and bluebottles buzz in celebration. We snip the grapes from the vines in heavy bunches, a hundred or more at once, bunch after bunch until our arms are tired. Now and then we eat a few grapes, their sweetness and warmth filling our mouths and dribbling down our arms, which like our shears are sticky with grape juice.
The olive harvest, by contrast, is bitter. It begins one morning in early December, when the cold air smells of wood smoke and a raw wind sluices through the trees. Bundled against the cold, Olivieri and I and a few of the hardier members of his family walk into his groves carrying ladders and long canes. We clamber up into the wet-limbed trees, strip the olives we can reach with our hands and knock down the others with the canes, into nets spread at the foot of the trees. Unlike the warmth and ease of the vendemmia, this is hard, tiring work, with a constant risk of falling—I worry about Olivieri with his arthritic knees on those wobbly ladders. Olive trees have no bunches of fruit dangling there for the taking. They give up their fruit unwillingly, which we often must pluck one by one from stubborn stems. Olives offer no sustenance as you work: most fresh olives are fiercely bitter from the natural antioxidants they contain.
But the biggest differences come after the harvest. Olivieri makes the wine himself. He has taken enology courses offered by the Italian government and the European Union, and knows the latest methods for filtration, malolactic fermentation, must treatment, and the other arcana of the wine-maker’s art. He practices this art in the vaulted cellar beneath his old stone farmhouse, amid the soft drip and simmer of fermenting wine, a place of stillness where he can stop and sip and meditate on his work, as all the while time works on the wine, helping him make it better.
His approach to olives is different. He has never studied olive-growing or oil-making, and employs the same methods he learned from his father and his grandfather, like canes to bring down the fruit, which Roman agronomists already advised against because they knew it bruised the olives. Nor does he make his own oil. Instead he drives his olives to a local mill, where a scene occurs that has been repeated throughout Italy since ancient times: in the noise and the flurry of the crush, as people hurry to process the most olives in the least time, Olivieri walks his fruit through the entire extraction process, olives to paste to oil, to ensure that the mille
r is not playing tricks—part of the bitter tinge of deceit that oil-making often has.
Olivieri’s wine is a respectable white table wine, honest but undistinguished, and he knows it: he calls it his vinello, his “little wine,” and to celebrate New Year’s or a christening he buys a bottle of something better. But he’d never buy someone else’s olive oil. Not so much because he thinks his oil is the best in the world, but because to him, at some level, it’s the only oil. And despite the hardships of the olive harvest, which are considerable for an old farmer whose joints and spine have labored three city lifetimes, Olivieri loves it more than the vendemmia. Recently, after our tenth harvest together, I asked him why. He shook his head, as if trying to remember something, and then said, “Because it’s harder.”
This difficulty brings an attachment to olives that doesn’t come with wine. Grapes are wanton, giving away their juice in huge quantities with the gentle pressure of the fingertips. Fresh olives, from a tree that knows the thrift and patience of the desert, cling to their oil—to wring it out you must grind and crush the olives under immense pressure, almost like an act of sacrifice. Olivieri’s attachment to the olive harvest, and respect for the fruit and the tree, continues in the oil. The most recent harvest was a good one, and his new oil is the brightest and most complex it’s been since I started tasting it ten years ago. I said it was something to be proud of.
“I’m happy, but not proud,” he said simply. “I didn’t do this. The olives make the oil.” This suggests another fundamental difference between wine and oil. Grapes contain not wine but grape juice, which must be transformed by the vintner’s art. Oil is already there in the olive, if we can only coax it free. Wine in the final analysis is man-made, while oil is made by nature, through the medium of the strange tree—mysterious, because it comes from something greater than ourselves. Wine in a meal is the soloist, set apart in its gleaming glass, while oil permeates the food, losing itself but subtly changing everything. Wine’s effects on us are vivid and swift, while oil works on the body in hidden ways, slow and lingering in the cells and in the mind, like myths. Wine is merry Dionysus; oil is Athena, solemn, wise, and unknowable.
