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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

lmao, they don't stand a chance. We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department to test if local producers aren't secretly mixing their extra virgin oil with chemically treated oil from last year. Nobody food snobs like the Italians (and I love them for it).

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> We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department

The US government operates several special tasting departments.

Probably not anymore

In the US, the best example is in California. To get the California Olive Oil Council stamp of extra virgin quality, you must have your oil tasted by the government body. I'm one of such tasters :)

ok, then I'll link this video again to make sure you don't miss it because I bet it's extra entertaining for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s

This is why I mostly buy Californian olive oil now. I like the legit italian or spanish kind more, but it's faked so often in the grocery store that it isn't even worth attempting to decide if it's real. Sometimes the fakes tell you it's cut with olives from africa, and sometimes they don't. The US importers are held to no standards whatsoever. At least when I buy california olive oil, it's 95% of the way there and guaranteed to be real.

Do the US tasting departments disqualify olive oil for daring to be (gasp!) Spanish in origin though?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s

Seems to me as they are Italian oil testers, identifying non-Italian oil as a problem makes sense, because from their perspective it doesn't meet the standards they are paid to uphold.

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