Last month,
the Olive Oil Times reported that two Spanish businessmen had been sentenced to two years in prison in Cordoba for selling hundreds of thousands of litres of supposedly extra virgin olive oil that was, in fact, a mixture of 70-80% sunflower oil and 20-30% olive.
In 2008, Italian police
arrested over 60 people and closed more than 90 farms and processing plants across the south after uncovering substandard, non-Italian olive oil being passed off as Italian extra virgin, and chlorophyll and beta-carotene being added to sunflower and soybean oil with the same aim.
Most alarmingly,
a study last year by researchers at the University of California, Davis and the Australian Oils Research Laboratory concluded that as much as 69% of imported European olive oil (and a far smaller proportion of native Californian) sold as extra virgin in the delicatessens and grocery stores on the US west coast wasn't what it claimed to be.
Dont just take things at face value. Some points to consider when buying your next bottle of EVO:
1. Find a seller who stores it in clean, temperature-controlled stainless steel containers topped with an inert gas such as nitrogen to keep oxygen at bay, and bottles it as they sell it. Ask to taste it before buying.
2. Favour bottles or containers that protect against light, and buy a quantity that you'll use up quickly.
3. Don't worry about colour. Good oils come in all shades, from green to gold to pale straw – but avoid flavours such as mouldy, cooked, greasy, meaty, metallic, and cardboard.
4. Ensure that your oil is labelled "extra virgin," since other categories—"pure" or "light" oil, "olive oil" and "olive pomace oil" – have undergone chemical refinement.
5. Try to buy oils only from this year's harvest – look for bottles with a date of harvest. Failing that, look at the "best by" date which should be two years after an oil was bottled.
6. Though not always a guarantee of quality, PDO (protected designation of origin) and PGI (protected geographical indication) status should inspire some confidence.
7. Some terms commonly used on olive oil labels are anachronistic, such as "first pressed" and "cold pressed". Since most extra virgin oil nowadays is made with centrifuges, it isn't "pressed" at all, and true extra virgin oil comes exclusively from the first processing of the olive paste.
Take a moment to read the following:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/04/olive-oil-real-thing
