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.
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 Nestle 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.
Nobody knows which cultivars the Spanish monks of New Norcia brought over from their homeland. Many trees died during the ocean journey, and as Gordon Smyth says, those which survived the salt air of the voyage "were as tough as old boots by the time they got here." Over the last 150 years, in the antipodean sunshine and the breezes off the Indian Ocean, these trees have grown apart from their Mediterranean ancestors and are now considered a separate cultivar, the West Australian mission olive.
The first olive oil importers to the New World were the conquistadors, for whom, as for their contemporaries in Spain, olive oil was a crucial food, fuel for lamps and engines, and active ingredient in medicine and religious rites. Spanish explorers packed quantities of olive oil, together with wine, salt pork, sardines, raisins, sandals and weapons, in each ship they sailed to the Americas. As in Roman times, when the legions planted olives wherever they were stationed, olive trees grew in the furrows of the conquistadors' swords, becoming a vivid symbol of conquest.
Congressional hearings on margarine began in the early 1880s and continued through 1950. In 1886, Congress enacted a Margarine Act, slapping stuff 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 teh 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.
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.
