Most of Us Are Blissfully Ignorant About How Much Rancid Olive Oil We Use (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Most of Us Are Blissfully Ignorant About How Much Rancid Olive Oil We Use (2016)

fivethirtyeight.com

57 pointsthrow0101b77 comments

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Kinda just sounds like we're ignorant of the definition of "rancid" and automatically associate it with "gone bad."

If you didn't know how cheese was made you could say we're blissfully ignorant about how much curdled milk we eat.

I am extremely confused by this article.

Rancid oil of any kind is foul and disgusting. You'd gag if you tried to eat something made with it.

Yet this article says things like:

> Rancidity, for example, isn’t generally a sought after quality in edible products. And yet, when it comes to olive oil in the U.S., people like it. Why? Partly, because rancid olive oil is less bitter than the good stuff.

Is this article using some definition of "rancid" different from the rest of us?

I totally get that some people don't like really fruity flavorful spicy olive oil. They want something more neutral. And that's fine.

But nobody in their right mind is picking something rancid. Nor would a supermarket ever sell it.

So I can't tell if the author doesn't know what rancid actually means, or if there's some separate food science definition of rancid that is different from everyday use -- but that the article doesn't bother to acknowledge or explain.

> But nobody in their right mind is picking something rancid. Nor would a supermarket ever sell it.

Unless it is cheese.

what do you mean by this?

sure some cheeses can be pretty smelly, but we're talking about olive oil, and whether 'rancid' makes any sense to describe something with subtler flavor than fresh

Something tasting rancid is not the same as actually being rancid.

Aged cheese is produced through rancidification.

Cheese is not rancid. Cheese is fermented, which is a completely different, harmless process

> Rancidification is the process of complete or incomplete autoxidation or hydrolysis of fats and oils when exposed to air, light, moisture, or bacterial action, producing short-chain aldehydes, ketones and free fatty acids.

> Fermentation is a metabolic process that produces chemical changes in organic substances through the action of enzymes.

So by those definitions, rancidification through enzyme-catalysed oxidation, which by proxy probably includes anything microbial, is fermentation. Vice versa aged cheese is produced through rancidification.

Doesn't sound completely different to me.

Disclaimer: A lot of the terms in those Wikipedia articles go over my head, so feel free to correct me.

It's essentially the same thing but controlled.

Rancid doesn't mean "completely rotten" even though some people use the term to only mean that. From wikipedia:

> When these processes occur in food, undesirable odors and flavors can result.

The end stage you describe is accurate, but since it's a process, people will call it rancid before the end stage. Further, since there is a large subjective factor in whether a flavor is undesirable, there are folks who will be more or less tolerant of those flavors - some folks will think the oil is fine or maybe a little stale, while others will be extremely sensitive gag at the same oil.

Compare meat: there are people who think aged beef tastes rotten while others consider it a delicacy.

'rancidification' may be an industry term for a chemical process, but that doesn't change the definition of 'rancid', which does in fact mean 'smells bad as in rotten'

Hence my entire paragraph discussing the concept of "subjective", and how some people have different opinions of "bad". I hate to be the bearer of bad news but: there exist 9 billion humans, and they have a wide range of opinions of what smells good and bad. Some of those opinions are in opposition to each other.

>But nobody in their right mind is picking something rancid. Nor would a supermarket ever sell it.

>So I can't tell if the author doesn't know what rancid actually means, or if there's some separate food science definition of rancid that is different from everyday use

More likely is that the average person doesn't know what rancid actually means in this context. Rancidity is a quality of oil that occurs when exposure to oxygen results in the existence of free radicals in the oil.

By and large, Americans actually prefer the taste of rancid olive oil.

> More likely is that the average person doesn't know what rancid actually means.

That's tautologically impossible. A word means exactly what most native speakers of the language believe it means.

And "rancid" means "smelling or tasting unpleasant as a result of being old and stale" or "rank in taste or smell" or "having an unpleasant smell or taste usually from chemical change or decomposition."

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+rancid

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rancid

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rancid

If "Americans actually prefer the taste," then it isn't "rancid" in American Standard English.

>A word means exactly what most native speakers of the language believe it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancidification

...except when it doesn't.

Is it so hard to understand that words can have different meanings in different circumstances? Context matters, words don't have one universal definition.

But this is an article intended for general readership, so it should use words as they are understood by general readers, or else point out that it is using a word in a non-general sense.

You're right that context matters. Which is precisely why this article is badly and misleadingly written, if the authors are ignoring the context of an average reader.

This isn't a food science journal for scientists, after all.

Fair enough, given the amount of confusion in the comments here it's clear that at the very least they should have explained the difference between rancidity in oils and the colloquial definition.

But most English speakers (IFAIK, I'm not native) use rancid as "spoiled" only for a group of produce, like oil or butter that went through rancidification process. So it's more like word rancid has more common meaning (being unpleasant) and more scientific and less commonly used one (went through rancidification).

Then it's a clickbait title.

Communicating badly and then acting smug when misunderstood is not cleverness.

https://xkcd.com/169/

That just sounds like some food experts have chosen to use the word "rancid" for a technical measure which is actually at odds with the meaning of the word in common usage. This is a common behaviour of experts, but it's patronising and doesn't really help anyone.

I don't know the etymology, but I think it's more likely that the colloquial definition of "rancid" evolved from the condition of rancidity in other oils, such as animal fats, that render them unpleasant and smelly, as opposed to just tasting different (as in the case of olive oil).

Like technical experts like to be precise but I’m failing to see how their use of rancid is not a synonym for oxidized

Yes, the unsaturated portion of the oil is most subject to oxidation from the environment, like from the oxygen in the air which acts more rapidly at warm storage temperatures than cold storage.

The expert odor committees are condemning oils that have an amount of oxidation that is so low it is hard for them to all agree so their consensus is the most accurate overall judgement.

Ordinary chefs are not likely to even notice such a slight amount of degradation.

This is a far cry from highly oxidized cooking oil like you sometimes have in fast-food operations who wait until it's long overdue to replace the oil in their fryers. This can often be so rancid you can smell it from quite a distance, anyone can agree about it, and any oil which is only a small fraction as bad doesn't earn the qualification as "rancid" by ordinary people.

And plenty of them go back for second helpings anyway.

Oxidised olive oil loses the characteristic burn you get if you eat a spoonful of it alone [1]. If the oil has oxidised to lose that flavour, it has lost other flavours, lost some of its health benefits and developed harmful compounds [2]. The author is saying many Americans have been conditioned to accept this neutralised taste out of ignorance (and possibly preference) [3].

> some separate food science definition of rancid that is different from everyday use

It appears the common definition of rancid conflicts in some cases, e.g. aged cheese and apparently olive oil, with the organic chemical one for rancidification [4]. It might be better to refer to the spoiled oil as rancidified rather than rancid.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleocanthal

[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-7777-8_...

[3] https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/olive-oil-study-shows-some-cons...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancidification

> Rancid oil of any kind is foul and disgusting. You'd gag if you tried to eat something made with it.

“Rancid” is just oxidized, and its a matter of degree. Yes, at the extreme this is true. But “rancid” is a continuum, not just the extreme.

> Is this article using some definition of "rancid" different from the rest of us?

No, he’s probably just wrong. Rancidity does not reduce bitterness; rancid olive oil is more bitter. It might at moderate levels be tolerable, but that doesn't make his description of why it would be desirable make sense. What he says it counteracts is, instead, a characteristic distinguishing sign of rancidity.

IIRC, there's a different kind of “bad" olive oil with fermentation products which adds (unpleasant to most people, like rotten fruit) sweetness, which as I understand is mostly oil from poorly-stored olives, not rancid oil. I suppose a small amount of this effect might counteract natural bitterness in olive oil, but for neutral flavor you can usually just buy refined (extra-)light olive oil, instead of EVOO.

Or, because rancid olive oil will have lost other characteristic flavors, some of which some people may not like, he may be right that it is desirable to some people, but wrong in attributing that to a reduction in bitterness.

Um no. It's decomposed oil or fat and smells bad. The definition includes 'tastes bad'.

Ok we're disputing the definition of 'rancid' which is low-quality discussion. But I think there's only one definition in common use? And it's not 'oxidized'. Maybe the word had been coopted by olive oil people at some point to mean something else? You can't expect the rest of us to understand what's being claimed, if ordinary words have had their meaning changed.

> There’s nothing inherently wrong with liking rancid olive oil. There is, however, a problem with thinking you’re buying extra virgin and getting low-quality oil instead. For starters, because extra virgin oil is harder to make, it commands higher prices.

But most people are buying extremely cheap olive oil. The "extra virgin" designation does not seem to be strongly associated with price in grocery stores. What is associated with price is the "made in Italy" label, compared to oils made in countries near Italy, or even California. And it's such a sharp price difference that relatively few people are buying authentic Italian EVOO anyway—3x or 4x as much, in my estimation.

Most people are buying big jugs of olive oil from, e.g., Turkey, and they're totally fine with it. They don't taste the difference, as the article notes. So, if there's nothing inherently wrong with rancid olive oil, and people are getting a year's supply for $20 already, then what exactly is the problem?

I go out of my way to find olive oil from outside Italy since I heard the Italian olive oil industry is tied up with organised crime. Most common alternative sources are Tunisia and California. It's hard sometimes because you'll see olive oils labelled "Greek" or "Tunisian", and then you turn the bottle over and it says "BOTTLED IN ITALY"...

> So, if there's nothing inherently wrong with rancid olive oil, and people are getting a year's supply for $20 already, then what exactly is the problem?

I mean, if you thought you bought a new Iphone but it's actually an Android phone, you could still download apps and send messages and stuff. What would the problem be in that case?

IMO it's that a company that is misrepresenting an Iphone that way is certainly capable of doing all kinds of other mendacious behavior. So Perhaps your Turkish olive oil is a mixture of some unknown percentage of (rancid) olive oil with cheaper oil(s). Perhaps its not olive oil at all, but just cheaper oil colored to look like olive oil.

At some point, having a namespace clash that large is going to cause problems.

To my knowledge the best comercially available olive oils that you can get from stores in the EU market are Greek and Spanish olive oils. Italians do have some very good olive oils but one can only get them either from the farm or a specialty store.

I've always been satisfied with my grocery-bought olive oil, but also curious as to what "good" olive oil actually tastes like. Is there a brand or vendor in the US that sells such a product?

It tastes relatively bad. Almost like having some fresh cut grass in it, and leaves a quite bitter aftertaste in your throat.

I just got back from overseas and while there went to a Michelin star restaurant where we got to sample different fresh olive oils and I can confirm they did taste somewhat like grass.

100%, that was exactly what it brought to mind for me as well: like I had reached into the lawn mower bag and sprinkled in some essence of grass clippings. No thanks.

If someone wants to call olive oil without grass-clippings-taste "rancid," it's a free country, but that term comes with overbearing negative connotations so I'd personally prefer "aged" or something.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-olive-oil/

The top recommendation is there, among other reasons, for that taste:

>This oil starts with a slight caramel flavor, but a bitter pungency blooms followed by a pleasant piquancy. We all enjoyed its grassy flavor, which one panelist said gave her “summer vegetable garden vibes.” The oil was rich but not overly fatty. One tester observed, “The way my tongue is responding reminds me of a good matcha—there’s that astringency, and then a long finish.”

Well, there are varieties, depending on the olive type you get more or less of a bitter, spicy or fruity taste. Here's a quick guide to Spanish olives used for oils:

- Picual - strong, bitter and spicy, very grassy, also one of the most common single-variety Spanish olive oils. Perfect for cooking meat, or mixing/marinating.

- Arbequina - not as strong, less spicy, with sweet, exotic fruity/grassy flavors. Awesome for making mayonnaise or ali-oli.

- Hojiblanca - somewhat middle-of-the-road, with moderate spice and bitterness, great for salads!

- Cornicabra - strength varies a lot, also spicy if harvested earlier, very sweet if harvested later. Great all-around. Tasty for cooking and for salads.

There are others, but these are the main ones. Early/late harvesting plays a significant role on taste, earlier being more bitter. In general, I love the very greenish-colored cornicabra olive oil, which are full of early harvest chlorophylls, and that are not too spicy.

Unfortunately, most non-Mediterranean (USA, UK...) grocery store extra virgin olive oils may not print the olive variety or is a blend oil produced and marketed for export...

In large cities or tourist towns you'll likely find a shop that sells nothing but olive oil and will provide you with bits of bread to dip in order to sample it to find one you like, like an ice cream shop.

Just keep buying it then, rancid just means exposed to air/oxidized. The good stuff is worth it when eating the oil but not as noticable.

Unless you buy it in small quantities and use it quickly after opening the bottle (within a week), it's rancid though.

California Olive Ranch is good. They grow and sell their own, and repackage imported oil. Their local stuff is very good quality. They have some single varietals (as opposed to blends) that are very tasty.

Yup, I second this. It's pretty much the only widely available high-quality affordable brand in the US. You tend to see chefs on cooking shows use it as their basic everyday olive oil.

There are plenty of great niche/imported brands as well, but it's pretty random as to which store might carry which ones, if any.

How can you reliably differentiate their local stuff from the oil that's mixed with imported oil, or even know whether the imported oil is EVOO?

IIRC they're no longer certified by the COOC. Given the massive amount of fraud in the olive oil industry, independent verification seems like the only tool to do that.

But even if you want to go by the seat of your pants, it seems like a bad idea to trust a company named "California Olive Ranch" whose growth into a nationally known label depends on importing olive oil from outside California.

Easy. I only — and I know this sounds silly — drink domestic :) I actively avoid imported olive oil for just the reasons you suggest. Last I looked, something like 50% of oil labelled “Italian EVOO” was in fact not, and a solid proportion of it wasn’t even olives. I’m not gambling with that, especially getting it shipped internationally.

California grows olives just fine, so I always use California oil. Now, is California Olive Ranch cheating some cheap import oil into their native EVOO? They could be; I’m betting not. My bet is that their own interests are best served by being straight here — one credible allegation of adulterating oil and their reputation takes a huge hit. Meanwhile, they can continue to charge lots of money for a high-quality product, which is just as it should be.

Brightland (also based in California) makes good olive oil too, though it is on the expensive side.

I'm a fan of PDO olive oil from regions in Greece that are known for their olive oil. Anything from Crete, Messinia, or Kalamata is usually top quality.

Since it's PDO, it's guaranteed to be a single cultivation, and from a region that takes its quality seriously.

Good olive oil is as complex as good wine or coffee can be. I recommend going to an olive oil shop and doing a guided tasting of a few different olive oils.

If you happen to be in NYC, Fairway sells pretty high quality olive oil under their house brand. Plus they have a tasting station in the olive oil aisle.

Other than the California brand others have mentioned, I haven’t found anything of similar quality in a supermarket, including Whole Foods and other high end markets.

> I've always been satisfied with my grocery-bought olive oil, but also curious as to what "good" olive oil actually tastes like.

There's an initial flavor that can be idiosyncratic to where the olives were grown-- to me it's quite a bit more savory and subtle than the same kinds of flavors we associate with wines, but it's usually there.

Then there's kind of aftertaste with a slightly "spicy" burn-- if tasting a small spoonful it can sometimes make people cough.

I actually hesitate to write this as a metric lest some flavor tech in New Jersey reverse engineer it as a target for flavor additives to conola oil or some such.

No need to get as fancy as some of the replies below would have you think. Believe it or not, Kirkland brand olive oil (yes, from Costco in the 2-liter jugs) is widely considered, even by many professionals, to be among the best olive oils on the market that you can buy at a reasonable price. I personally use it and love it, and i'm originally from a region of the world where many families had many generations spent growing their own olives and making their own oil.

A couple of references to back my claim

https://www.thedailymeal.com/1157209/what-sets-costco-extra-...

https://www.countryliving.com/food-drinks/a44246/best-olive-...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/costco-olive-oil_n_5981e0abe4...

This articles assumes all people are good at smelling and tasting and that it is just a matter of education.

But just like some people has bad eye sight, some people has bad smell and taste abilities.

I went on a trip to Italy a few years ago and picked up some Laudemio Castello di Poppiano olive oil on-site. When I got back home, I set up a blind taste test between that and Colavita for friends and family. I preferred the Laudemio but was astounded that everyone else (8 people maybe?) preferred the Colavita. Go figure.

That said, I did the same blind test for balsamic vinegar and everyone vastly preferred the real aged stuff over the American balsamic.

On the other hand if you eat rancid coconut oil you’ll know

> rancid olive oil is less bitter than the good stuff

I remember tasting the olive oil in my cupboard a few weeks ago and being slightly worried that it tasted pretty bitter. Sounds like it actually has to taste bitter - somehow I expected rancid oil to be more bitter than good oil, not less...

If the oil was supposed to be bitter and it no longer is, that means all the organic compounds (including the aromas) have degenerated and the oil is essentially just the "oil" part. Past expiration date should smell and taste a bit foul but not bitter.

It's kind of like how soft cookies get hard when they go stale, but hard cookies get soft. Whatever it is when fresh, it's the opposite when stale.

> The presence of defects disqualifies an oil from being classified as extra virgin

What's the definition of (not necessarily extra-) virgin olive oil?

I had it stuck in my head it should be from the first olives of the harvest. But after several minutes of ddging I can find a reference.

TIL. I thought it meant that it had not been purified (more of the "olive" still present in the oil).

That is filtered vs. unfiltered, and has nothing to do with the "virgin" or "extra virgin" categories.

It's to do with the pressing, not the harvest. AFAIK the first press of the olives is EVOO and after that they have other ways of extracting remaining oils (e.g. Pomace is a semi-chemical process on the remaining pulp)

That must be it - the first pressing of the olives for extra virgin, as I was sure there was a 'first' something.

Interesting this definition is slightly different from that in the article, a different epistemology: The first pressing would require trust (however arrived at) in a supply chain to declare, the second measuring the resulting product (positivist trust by measurement); the first encouraging diversity (artisanry?) perhaps over a less diverse (more verifiable?) final product with the second.

Thanks for your answer. And to the several other commenters.

"Virgin" oil is obtained form strictly mechanical means, that is, from pressing the olives without additional chemical or thermal processing. "Extra virgin" oil also implies the oil is pure and of good quality, which means it has no additives and the acidity, bitterness, etc are within certain parameters.

The harvest is a different dimension of olive oil categories .

Thank you for the reply.

Is there a term for the harvest as a dimension? Or that's down to individual producers? Does it even translate, or requires olive region growing context? [A question that perhaps isn't easy if it merges commodity brands and independent producers.]

In general the harvest season depends on the region, and often the farmers wait as much as possible because ripen olives simply contain much more oil.

However, less ripen olives produce more green tinted and strong flavored oil so some fancy brands sell "early harvest" olive oil, taken a few months before the regular harvest, as premium varieties.

1. Essentially, the first time they press/smash a bunch of olives they can easily slurp/ladle out a bunch of the oil.

2. The remaining crushed olive junk still has oil in it, and they apparently have various industrial/chemical processes to extract that in 2nd/3rd passes.

#1 is virgin olive oil.

#2 is almost always labeled virgin olive oil, at least in the U.S., because it's not illegal to do that. This is in addition to bottles labeled as olive oil which are actually a mixture of olive and other oils, or even other oil(s) with coloring to look like olive oil.

The companies that actually bottle #1 tend to also do other best practices in bottling, labeling, and storing the oil which gets the oil certified by orgs like the COOC.

Uh oh, the COOC has screwed up their SSL certificate:

https://cooc.com/

Help them, HN!

It's fixed!

Go HN SSL rescue team!

Blissful sounds about right, because I don't care. It smells good, tastes good, and works just fine. Also, I buy the cheapest organic EVOO from Lidl, so I'm not exactly paying a lot.

I doubt that the oil is actually rancid, as in like rotten over time. It's just the hot-pressed oil from the already cold-pressed olives and their pits. Or it's oil from actually ripe olives, which is not as "healthy" for some reason.

Also the good olive oil does have a really bitter after taste, that people would really not enjoy.

What is your reason for saying this? The article does discuss rancid, not just mis-categorized pressing.

Because I assume for most people "rancid" means "gone bad", instead of some technical word about oxidation of fats.

The article almost reads like the US is getting old expired oil from Europe, while it's actually getting good oil that has just been produced in a different way.

I think the article does reflect the actual state of the oil sold in the USA.

The linked report [1] goes into deeper detail: They take into account adulteration of "extra virgin" oil with refined oil, water and oil past its expiration date. They call the later "rancid" olive oil because olive oil never really gets rotten, over time (a couple of years at most) it tastes worse because most of the organic components degenerate until it is essentially just liquid fat. That's as bad as olive oil can get, and in that state it could not be sold in most countries of origin.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170607233619/http://c1.oliveoi...

Most of the oils I end up getting are of the blend type. As usually that is about all you can get at a grocery store. The labeling is all over the place and near zero enforcement of what is going on. I have on 2 different occasions gotten 'good' oil. It has haunted me since. As finding good stuff is tough. Where as before I did not care.

Rancid isn't the same as rotten. Oil going rancid is about oxidation and other chemical degradation. This has nothing to do with "health" of the oil...

It has to do with the health effects of the oil. It radically (pun intended and yes I know that's not the only mechanism) transfoms the lipid profiles and generate compounds which for some we know may have health impact.

Do you mean that the oxidized oils will have less (or none) of the health benefits that the fresh oils would?

That's what a few studies seem to hint at. As with most food stuff studies we need time and lots of replication. And make sure that the food lobbies didn't mess up like what happened with the sugar industry.

The usage of “rancid” in everyday conversation is exclusively referring to something that “went bad” in my experience.

The top definitions of the word agree, e.g.:

> having an unpleasant smell or taste usually from chemical change or decomposition

> having a rank, unpleasant, stale smell or taste, as through decomposition, especially of fats or oils

>the good olive oil does have a really bitter after taste, that people would really not enjoy.

That heavily depends on the olive variety. Try Arbequina if you want sweeter olive oil.

Also, the chemical composition of the olive do change over time and very ripe olives produce a less greenish, mild flavored oil, but it's not clear one is healthier than the other.

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