Column

Olive oil scandal leaves a foul taste

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published August 12, 2007

Et tu, Italia?

We know China can't be trusted with our health and safety. Its exports have poisoned our dogs and cats and put toys coated with lead paint in the hands and mouths of our children. Its contaminated seafood poses health risks to American consumers and its toothpaste can be lethal.

But Italy? Say it ain't so, Luigi. Never would I have thought the Italians would try to sneak something by us, especially adulterated olive oil. That's right - healthy, sacred olive oil, the key to the kingdom of Italian cooking. Pesto, salads, sauces, fish, fowl and veal - they are nothing without it.

The story of olive oil fraud, a criminal enterprise in Italy and some other countries, is reported by Tom Mueller in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine. It is one of those pieces I wish I had never come across. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Mueller wrote: "In February 2005, (Italian authorities) broke up a criminal ring operating in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand liters of fake olive oil, with a street value of 6-million euro (about $8-million). The ring, which allegedly sold its products in northern Italy and in Germany, is accused of coloring low-grade soy oil and canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, flavoring it with beta-carotene, and packaging it as extra-virgin olive oil in tins and bottles emblazoned with pictures of Italian flags or Mt. Vesuvius, and with folksy names of imaginary producers - the Farmhouse, the Ancient Millstones."

Now I am left to wonder if that bottle of "extra-virgin, first cold pressed" olive oil I bought recently at a local Italian market is the real thing or an adulterated version made with Turkish hazelnut oil or Argentine sunflower-seed oil - or even worse, with lampante, an olive oil so inferior it is used as lamp fuel. Of course, fake olive oil is not going to sicken or kill the way, for example, Chinese toothpaste has. That may explain why U.S. inspectors rarely bother to test olive oil arriving here from Italy.

According to Mueller, most olive oil frauds are easy to detect using chemical tests. However, the more sophisticated scams "typically take place at high-tech refineries, where the oil is doctored with substances like hazelnut oil and deodorized lampante olive oil, which are extremely difficult to detect by chemical analysis."

The best way to test olive oil is to taste it, Mueller wrote. No problem for Italians, who reportedly are as upset as anyone about olive oil adulteration, but I don't trust my own taste buds, which have been dulled over the years by pipe smoke and wine.

Friends tell me I should worry less about the olive oil I buy - most of which is probably true to its label - and more about the ingredients in the food I pick up on faith at local supermarkets. Or about what I order at local restaurants. They have a point. For example, this newspaper cracked the Great Grouper Scam. Tampa Bay diners were ordering grouper, a local favorite, and being charged for grouper. But they were unknowingly being served a white-fish substitute.

Shopping for food was hard enough without having to worry about olive oil fraud. To read the artificial ingredients on the labels of prepackaged and processed food is unsettling. It probably would be frightening if I understood what the ingredients really were. In recent years I have shopped for chicken and beef that claims to be free of hormones and antibiotics. Same with eggs. I also look for products with zero trans fat, the latest villain in the American diet. And after the Chinese gluten used in pet food sickened or killed dozens of dogs and cats, I can't bring myself to buy any food item that contains gluten. Maybe it was imported from China, maybe it wasn't. But why take a chance.

Pushing my cart down aisles of jammed supermarkets these days, I sometimes long for the days of my youth, when most of what was on the dinner table was grown on our farm. We killed our own hogs, took eggs from our own pampered chickens, drank raw cow's milk and harvested vegetables from our garden. Money was always in short supply, but food never was.

My wife recently visited her mother in Tiger, Ga., and came home with a carload of tomatoes, green beans, okra, squash, and potatoes - all from the family garden, which somehow managed to survive monsoons, drought and assorted varmints who helped themselves under cover of darkness. As I feast on this bounty, I am reminded that you don't need olive oil to have a divine eating experience - and that for seasoning, sometimes the humble ham hock will do just fine.

[Last modified August 11, 2007, 21:58:05]