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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

After learning a few years ago about the large-scale fraud involved in the export olive oil industry, I started trying domestic olive oil instead (I'm in the US).

My favorite domestic oil, which is available everywhere now, is California Olive Ranch (e.g, http://amzn.com/B005CT8R90). It's delicious. Tastes nothing like the horrible oils I had been unknowingly eating for years, and there's no way I could ever go back.

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There's a write up from America's test Kitchen about olive oil taste tests [0] (click 'read more'); spoiler: California Olive Ranch is their top pick.

[0] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/1637-superma...

I used to buy large quantities of olive oil from an importer a few years back. He worked directly with the producers in Europe and N. Africa and told me about the fraud that happens in the industry. One interesting thing he told me was that the domestics simply don't have enough supply to meet year round demand. So one of the things they would do is buy his imported oil and mix it with theirs to make it last through the year and bottle it as domestic. The lesson for me was that domestic/local doesn't mean more honest...you still have to ask lots of questions to verify.

If you're buying olive oil in the US it is very unlikely to be domestic. USA consumes about 20x as much as it produces.

Thanks for this. We use a lot of olive oil in our family and I've read plenty on these abuses, but the articles never call out brands. 69% of all EVOO off the shelf in the US doesn't pass muster? Tell me which 31% did! And for crying out loud, shame the shit out of the ones that failed.

In any case, gonna buy some of this now. Cheers!

They don't name names because it's probably scaremongering propaganda. Somebody wants to boost local oil consumption or other oils (other than olive) or something

If you don't name what you want people to get instead, how could this even be true?

Mother jones has great reporting in general -- they're not an outfit that is a corporate ad extension.

I'm not thinking of corporations. Local govt, etc. The study was made by -surprise- a university in the state where olive oil is produced. Btw about ads there's nothing more effective than a journalist that does it for free. There's another thread now in HN about marijuana's awesomeness. Don't people think for themselves anymore? do you all take a package of propaganda and ideology and blissfully swallow it without thinking twice?

The problem is that people should be able to trust the news, not that they don't think for themselves. I do plenty of "thinking", I just don't have any time to evaluate the authenticity of my olive oil. Think about how many decisions you need to make in a day; if you had to verify every article, product, or piece of information you ingest on a daily basis you wouldn't have time to do anything else.

We have a huge problem where you really can't trust anything you hear or see; especially news. However, what's the solution? If I want to be up to date on world politics who do I trust? How do I know I can trust them? What about a new product? The manufacturer says it's healthy; an "article"says its not. Who do I trust? Is the article genuine or paid off by a competitor to boost their own sales? Do I have to do my own research and studies to find out the truth? That's hardly scalable.

OTOH a site like HN do produce this analysis for each link, by means of comments.

It would be pretty interesting to have something like HN, perhaps a bit broader in topic selections, where the analysis was captured in a more structured manner and published for other services to reuse in various ways to aid the reader.

>Mother jones has great reporting in general -- they're not an outfit that is a corporate ad extension.

I'm sorry but are you kidding? Upon visiting this page I was presented with this ad that had no dismiss button: http://prntscr.com/c5bb9h

If you were a raging liberal, then I suppose you'd consider Mother Jones and its insistence on giving your email to the "Progressive Turnout Project" before reading their content to be "great reporting" (by the way, Mother Jones was paid for this - does that not qualify as a "corporate ad extension"?). But personally, I can't stand political propaganda sites that masquerade as journalism, and I especially can't stand any site that requires me to give my email to third parties before I can read their content. That's a nonstarter.

No such thing as a journalistic organization without a platform. You're not surprising anyone. You should instead spend time showing that they're biased instead of just announcing this. Having a stance doesn't preclude good, unbiased journalism.

Exactly right. Mother Jones is nothing more than a bought and paid for, left-leaning (to the point of tipping over) propaganda machine. Here are some of their awesomely impartial headlines:

Donald Trump's Freefall Captured in Two Scathing Magazine Covers

Republicans Say We Should Just Laugh Off Donald Trump’s Assassination "Joke." No.

How Unpopular Is Trump? Clinton Is Courting Mormon Voters in Utah Now. (subtitle: This is what a landslide looks like.)

The Trump Files: Donald's Recurring Sex Dreams

Philadelphia Elections Official Destroys Conservative Conspiracy Theory that National Elections Are "Rigged"

It keeps going. I wonder who "Mother" wants us to vote for?

Pretty much every news publication / organization has some internal bias / lean (some more than others). That does not mean their reporting is inaccurate.

Some internal bias is one thing, if it is disclosed. Mother Jones, however, is a bastion of extreme leftist rhetoric that tries to pass itself off as a legitimate source of news. That is the part that is disturbing and very misleading to those that haven't been warned about or don't already know about the site. Maybe some sort of logo, even an arrow pointing to the left or right, or a Chrome plugin that turns the site blue or red for a few seconds when you first go to a page on it, would be good for these kinds of sites.

It could vary over time, depending on where the packagers get it from.

Exactly. I don't know much about olive oil, but in the world of bourbon, it's fairly common for bourbon-makers to win awards with recipes that they bottled years ago, and leverage those awards to sell sub-standard distillate that they've rushed out the door to keep up with demand.

We are grateful to... California Olive Ranch... for their financial support of this research.

The most delicious olive oil I've ever had was at a random restaurant in San Diego. It had a very distinct "this came from olives" flavor, unlike all the bland stuff I'd had before, and tasted very fresh and clean. It was so good that we asked the waiter what it was. Unfortunately he didn't know the brand, but apparently it was made at a farm in Arizona. That was quite shocking. Arizona is a very hot, arid state, and yet somehow they make great olive oil. We've been on the hunt ever since and now, like you, tend to buy domestic.

Olive trees tend to thrive in hot, arid places like Italy, Greece, and Spain in the summer.

Also Israel.

Thanks for linking this! I just bought a couple of bottles, going to have my sister bring them up to me when she comes home. Always on the hunt for good olive oil.

This is cool, thanks for this. I've largely stopped using olive oil (safflower for cooking, walnut for salads) entirely because finding something that doesn't taste off is difficult without spending a lot or going well out of my way, but my local place has this and I think I'll give it a shot.

Same here, California Olive Ranch is great and a safe choice. It's worth pointing out that there are some genuine European brands, of course. One of them is Terra Medi, which is Greek. More expensive but very good.

Ditto, I have been buying this olive oil for the past 2 years. Its a beautiful olive oil and cooks amazingly well. It was such a relief finding this brand given the amount of choices there are for (bad) olive oil!

Yes that stuff is good.

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