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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

To that I'd suggest reading https://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-fake-extra-virgin-.... Since then I've bought California olive oil and giggled at all of the Italian brands.

About the article, my honest first thought was, "Does it matter? They already weren't selling olive oil in the first place, now they just have to pretend harder."

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"You might raise your eyebrows at the conclusion that Australian and California extra virgin olive oils are purer than most Italian olive oils, since the research was partially funded by the California Olive Ranch and the California Olive Oil Council and has ties with the Australian Olive Association"

Well, most Italian olive oils sold in California. I think that makes it a lot less surprising. The regulations of the oil fraud police of Italy only apply to Italy, after all.

Also of note that Italian companies tend to sell their best food at home, where competition is fiercer and taste is more discerning. The exported stuff is traditionally weaker, because foreign markets are less picky.

Perhaps, but that's five years old and there's been no serious refutation I've heard of.

It's not like there aren't legitimate reasons to back a study that might reveal something you've long suspected, e.g. that your competitors are frauds...

California Olive Ranch is a great brand. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Interesting!

Since that article is from 2011, I wanted to see if there was any follow-up research on that. Using the paper's title as a starting point on Google Scholar I could only find better techniques for checking, but no papers sampling many brands. Then I noticed that the PDF was hosted on "olivecenter.ucdavis.edu"[0]. Going to that website revealed no further research either. In fact, the research tab of their menu links to example.com[1]. Bit annoying, that.

[0] http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/what-we-do/report%20041211%20...

[1] https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/

“Research” seems to be branch node, with live links only on the leaves, “Projects”, “Our Reports”, and “UC Olive Database". Which is a website fail, sure, but since the leaves are on the page navigation, not one that stops you from getting to the data (and since “Research” isn't a link on the nav bar, just a label, the only way to get to the broken page seems to be following breadcrumbs from one of the leaves.)

It only leads to example.com with JS disabled. It's actually an on-click dropdown menu with three options:

- Projects: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/projects

- Our Reports: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/reports

- UC Olive Database: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/publications

You guessed correctly that I had JS disabled. Thank you!

After I read about what passes for extra-virgin olive oil in the US I decided to try and get my hands on some domestic certified extra-virgin: I was blown away. I won't buy anything else now (not because of an article but because of the flavor.) It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the cheap stuff found in grocery stores is just canola oil and green food coloring.

I do the same as you're essentially guaranteed the pressed on date and a much fresher product than what's available at any shop sort of a dedicated oil store. A lot of what actually has a pressed on date labeled at the store currently is November 2017 harvest and with some 2016 harvests thrown in too! You can now order 2018 pressed oil if you go direct for the freshest product available.

I thought the same thing. When I buy "olive oil", I just think of it more as a style than a product actually made from olives. I don't think an olive tree crisis will have an impact on whatever I'm buying.

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