The Adulteration of Italian Olive Oil | Hacker News Reader

The Adulteration of Italian Olive Oil

nytimes.com

75 pointsacdanger69 comments

It's good for people to be aware of this but there's so much either ignored or misrepresented as to make this almost harmful.

Fake olive oil peddlers aren't hurting themselves by peddling fake oil as the scam is as old as the olive oil industry itself. It's likely never going to go away and has been a mainstay of various criminal organizations (Sicilian mafia, etc) for longer than pretty much all of us have been alive.

What should also be pointed out is that many Americans seem to have smell/taste quality standards of EVOO completely backwards. An olive oil of desirable quality should have a strong flavor; bitter and peppery.

It's so easy to get a decent quality olive oil once you know what to look for and it doesn't at all have to be from Italy. California Olive Ranch makes good stuff that is highly price competitive with the imported Italian stuff which is always more questionable anyway.

> It's so easy to get a decent quality olive oil once you know what to look for and it doesn't at all have to be from Italy. California Olive Ranch makes good stuff that is highly price competitive with the imported Italian stuff which is always more questionable anyway.

Thank you for the recommendation! I've been looking for some good olive oil and I seem to recall seeing them at the local stores. Definitely think I will go with local olive oil instead of the "Italian" stuff.

I'm so lucky. My local Kroger regularly puts it on sale for $9. There's really no beating that.

We were in the Slovenian/Italy recently on a business trip, and on our way home my company decided we should buy some wine. So we went to this place that offered us prosciutto with olive oil to dip in.

I was told that really good olive oil would sorta... sting you in the throat if you get a decent amount of it.

And it did. It was the first time I've ever had decent/real/good olive oil.

Anyway, pretty cool. Now I'm scared of buying olive oil.

my mouth is watering at the thought of eating prosciutto right now. Thank you! :D

Interesting. AFAIK, it depends on the oils and from what you're telling me on the countries too. For instance, olive oil that stings in Greece is a no-no. Tell a greek that the olive oil you get in other european countries stings you in the throat and he'll most likely tell you you're getting ripped off, especially when you also take into account the price.

California Olive Ranch makes good stuff that is highly price competitive with the imported Italian stuff which is always more questionable anyway.

Great comment. I've been buying California Olive Ranch oil since I first read about olive oil adulteration a couple years ago.

This review: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/dining/californias-olive-o... is very helpful.

What do I see when I get to this page?

An olive skull and crossbones with EXTRA VIRGIN SUICIDE.

Let me scroll down so I can see more!

I hit the down arrow. Nothing happens.

I try the Page Down key. Nothing happens.

Ah, yes, I know, the keyboard doesn't always work on every website. I'll just use the scroll bar!

Hmm... No scroll bar.

Wait! Over on the right, there's a box with a triangle in it, pointing up.

It almost looks like the top arrow in a scroll bar. That's not the direction I wanted to go, but it looks like a clicky thing, so I'll try it.

Yay! The up arrow scrolls right! And I can click the up arrow again and it scrolls right again.

And now there's a left arrow angle bracket over on the left that scrolls left when I click it.

Why is one an angle bracket and the other a triangle?

Why does one point left and the other up?

This Must Mean Something.

But never mind that, at least now I understand that this page doesn't go up and down, it goes left and right, and I have a way to navigate it.

Hmm... Left and right? Maybe I can try the left and right keys? Yes indeedy, they work!

I feel like such a computer expert now.

You can also just click anywhere on the title image.

My experience: "Hey, there are a bunch of dots at the bottom, just like my iPhone. The left one is lit up. I'll try tapping right. Oh, neat."

Honestly never even noticed the giant right arrow on the right side.

My wife (who didn't see me navigating about), within ~2 seconds of looking at the page, said she'd tap the giant arrow to go to the next page.

While I think they could certainly have done better, I don't think it's as bad as you're making it out to be.

My biggest complaint is that on mobile the pages snap in rather than sliding in as you swipe.

You're probably right, I was over-dramatizing it a bit. On a touch device I would have probably figured it out sooner too, and it didn't really take me that long to figure it out on the desktop browser.

Anyway, I figured out why I wasn't seeing a proper right arrow. It's a bug in their CSS. They're using this sprite sheet:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/13/food-ch...

This has the left and right arrow symbols at the bottom right. The left arrow is working correctly, but for the right arrow the specificity of their selectors is a bit messed up. The right arrow has a background-position that should select the bottom right corner of the sprite sheet, but this particular rule is getting overriden by a background: in a more specific selector that makes it use the top left corner (0 0) instead. And that top left corner happens to include the top of the fork-chicken's tail, which was looking like an up arrow to me.

I guess the moral of the story is if you're going to do this kind of fancy presentation, there are a lot of things that can go wrong!

Horrible for accessibility sake. Which is important to people who have all kinds of issues with non standard methods of navigation.

I don't see an up-arrow, but I do see a giant arrow pointing right.

Unlike many counterfeit things... as far as I can tell, this really doesn't make any difference in the end, because olive oil is all about flavor, not labels.

Good olive oil can taste hundreds of ways, just like wine -- there are even olive oil tastings. The flavor can't be counterfeited at all, so it doesn't really matter what's on the label, what country it comes from, etc. -- olive oil is all so different, it can really only be bought by taste alone. You might have 5 different olive oils in your cupboard depending on what you're using them for, but you didn't buy any of them based on their label!

There's plenty of olive oil labeled extra-virgin that tastes like nothing. Is it really extra-virgin? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, it doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that it doesn't taste like anything. If you're looking for an oil that doesn't have any taste (which there are many uses for), and it's cheap, go ahead and buy it. (I buy super-cheap "extra-light" olive oil for frying, it tastes like nothing, maybe it's cut with soybean oil, but cooking-wise it wouldn't even matter.)

In the end, "extra-virgin" is a label that doesn't really tell you anything, there are so many other factors involved. The only people being "duped" are the people who can't tell anyways.

(I mean, obviously I don't condone counterfeit oil, I'm just saying that as far as counterfeit things go, counterfeit EVOO is probably the least problematic thing ever.)

The (lack of) health benefits from using soy bean oil instead of pure olive oil may be significant, or at least misleading.

as far as I can tell, this really doesn't make any difference in the end

Unfortunately, that's not the case. When olive oil is adulterated with oils that have lower smoke points, and that adulterated oil is then used under heat, for cooking, the adulterant oils can break down and yield toxic compounds (e.g., aldehydes and hydroperoxids). [1]

EDIT: Also, as noted by a sibling comment, the Ω3:Ω6 ratios for some of the adulterant oils can be wildly different from olive oil, in sub-optimal, or even deleterious ways.

EDIT 2: And what about food allergies? Suppose someone with a hazelnut allergy buys hazelnut oil-adulterated olive oil (they're fairly similar in terms of fatty acid contents, so it's a somewhat common adulterant). Still think it doesn't make a difference?

(Also edited for tone.)

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050617065306.ht...

EVOO already has a low smoke point as far as oils are concerned, processed soy/canola/corn/etc. oil all have significantly higher smoke points.

I can't imagine a scenario where a manufacturer would be adulterating EVOO with another oil that has a lower smoke point -- there just aren't any that would be make economic sense, as far as I know.

sunflower and safflower oils, the two most commonly substituted oils for olive oil (as far as counterfeiting goes), have a similar or _much lower_ smoke point than olive oil in an unrefined state. 225F, in fact. That's almost 100 degrees lower than olive oil.

If they used unrefined sunflower or safflower oil, then your olive oil would wind up with a lot of flavor of those oils, since unrefined oil is very flavorful. They would seem like horrible choices for adulteration, since it would be so obvious. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but do you have a source on that? I'm genuinely curious.

On the other hand, refined sunflower and safflower oil have higher smoke points than EVOO, and the flavor loss due to refining would let them blend in.

What? Safflower oil is flavorless. As for sources, there've been various articles about olive oil adulteration over the years...including one really long one from a few years ago that was popular on most aggregator sites - think it was also an NYT article.

The real issue, IMO, is the Ω3:Ω6 ratios. As someone who is trying to lower the amount of Ω6 in his diet, I can no longer trust olive oil

To quote an excerpt from that link:

" Virgin olive oil was, amongst all the oils studied, that which took longer to produce this type of compounds and produced a lower concentration of them."

I am going to assume (and hope) that that was an off-the-shelf sample, which includes the adulteration you are talking about. Unfortunately, there no further information available.

I think that means the opposite of what you think it means. That it takes virgin olive oils longer to produce fewer toxic compounds is a good thing.

Most Keto folks really care about what cooking oils they use because of different fat contents, but most of them aren't using olive oil and using coconut oil for everything anyway.

Personally I'd be really pissed about getting cut olive oil because usually it's Sunflower or Safflower oil and both (along with Grapeseed Oil) have massive quantities of highly-undesirable Omega-6. Might as well have gotten the substantially cheaper corn or soybean oils because they're just as bad for you.

" The flavor can't be counterfeited at all, so it doesn't really matter what's on the label . . . . You might have 5 different olive oils in your cupboard depending on what you're using them for, but you didn't buy any of them based on their label!"

Huh? What world are you living in? I mean, maybe you have five different olive oils in your cupboard and maybe their labels had nothing to do with the ones you chose. But do you really think that the average reader on HN (or average purchaser in US) chooses which brand of olive oil to buy by taste? Holy moly, out of touch. I suppose next you'll be telling us that a wine or winery's name or a wine bottle's label have nothing to do with why people choose it? Welcome to the world of "marketing".

It's a decent enough gamble on HN. Most of the younger east-coast and scandinavian techies that I know are very much into foodieism. "Foodie Dice" was an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign. Younger folks are starting to care a lot more about ingredients than the past few generations it seems.

I don't think you get it -- that's my point. If your "average purchaser in the US" can't tell the difference, then it won't matter to them anyways, right? And if they can tell the difference, then they're already buying by flavor.

EVOO isn't Coca-Cola. There's no standard flavor. It's the same as complaining about counterfeit wine -- if it tastes good for the price, does it ultimately matter if it's "counterfeit" or not? The flavor is the flavor.

If your "average purchaser in the US" can't tell the difference, then it won't matter to them anyways, right?

So, "Fuck 'em if they don't know enough to know they're getting cheated?" Nice.

How are you getting cheated if it makes no difference?

Because you miss out on the chance to get angry?

As other have mentioned the inferior oils might not be as healthy, this might be a reason to care not just 'cause'.

As I just amended my comment up-thread to say: allergies. Food allergies can kill you, and nut oils (nuts being a fairly common, and often severe allergen) are sometimes used used as an olive oil adulterant.

Adulterated olive oil isn't even labeled that it's adulterated, let alone what with.

Would the same apply to selling fake multi-vitamin tablets?

If you want an oil without any taste, how about canola oil? Canola oil is high in omega-3 and the mafia is not adulterating it with who-knows-what.

If you want actual olive oil, Trader Joe's Kalamata oil is probably the easiest to get ahold of. I haven't tried the California Estate oils, but I hear they are also good (if fresh)

Why doesn't the article name the brands that cheat? Or at least list some that don't?

http://www.truthinoliveoil.com/2012/09/toms-supermarket-pick...

(Tom Mueller is the source for this article and he's been at this for a while, having written an article on sneaky olive oil producers for the New Yorker in 2007.)

He also has a buyer's guide on the same site and it sounds like, at his level, buying olive oil is trickier than buying wine. Not only is it dependent on harvests and growers, it is also perishable.

It’s more narrative than factual, and proving either of those points (cheat or don’t) would be difficult.

Also the bit about prices going down being caused by the fraud is far from factual. Doesn’t mean it’s untrue, but it’s a designed as a story with a moral at the end, not a study.

There have been several articles about this previously, and even a book (I'm probably more aware of this than many HN readers since I follow several food blogs.) Here are some lists of what to buy and not buy:

http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-fake-extra-virgin-o...

http://articles.courant.com/2012-09-10/business/hc-ls-consum...

Trader Joe's and Costco were two that consistently came out on top. (For what it's worth, I've been buying the Costco organic EVOO and it's been great. I'm a supertaster and can--fortunately or unfortunately--taste the difference.)

what are some food blogs you can recommend?

also, is lifehacker becoming the next about.com? seems like anyone and everyone can write for it, and i found their content to be pretty cheap these days

Content of the article itself aside, I think this is a very well designed piece of online content. Very easy to follow and way better than some wall of text article you'd expect to see!

For me, I'd much rather read the "wall of text". I found myself wanting more depth and detail about the story.

I too enjoyed the nice storytelling and graphics. And knowing it's only about 10 pages helped to start following it. But being used to more information I felt like "Is that it" in the end. Could work better with linked in-depth article in the end.

I find the side scrolling and paging annoying. I'd rather just have all the content on one page. Just let me scroll vertically like a normal webpage.

We have been producing organic olive oil for some years with my family.. And i can tell you that everybody in this industry knows about this shit

Adulteration of olive oil is one of the many shamefull thing that affect my country. Is one of those stories that politicians face "the italian way" = they don't do a heck till something really bad happens (like people dying)

We had this topic on news for years now.. News tv show Report talked about it with an investigation aired on Primetime on national broadcast tv in 2002.. (If you understand italian is worth watching) http://www.report.rai.it/dl/Report/puntata/ContentItem-17eec...

Yet after more than 10years we still know that this shit is still going on..

It's such a shame cos not only exporting fake olive oil damages the whole industry but also because you spread a Twisted culture on olive oil.

Like many says.. It s like wine. I ve been drinking high quality olive oil for all my life and when i get to taste some industrial "so called" extravirgin olive oil i feel like i have to throw up.

But if you think about it, olive oil adulteration it's even more important than wine, since health factors are much more at stake. We hear nutritionist say "use olive oil cos is good for your health " and they are right.. It's damn good. Some study says it's like a natural antibiotic... So you go and buy it.. But guess what If you stumble upon adulterated olive oil you get no nutritional benefits and instead you swallow far more dangerous stuff hidden in It like chems.

That's a subtle deception.. And "hell yea" is made in Italy :-(.

So my advice is be selective when you buy extra virgin olive oil from our country (but also spain, greece and france).

As a random plug, I'll say that I really enjoy Lucero brand olive oil from California (http://www.lucerooliveoil.com/). There's pretty much no question their oil is what they say it is, you can even tour their groves and facilities if you end up in the area. And their stuff is great, I wish I could afford to keep stocked in their oil for all manner of cooking.

This is an example of both very good information and also good design.

Really? I didn't personally find that the extremely simple graphics enhanced my understanding of the short and shallow paragraphs of text. It almost felt like just-pre-Idiocracy media spoon-feeding.

Well, I learned that the Carabinieri dangle from helicopters with machine guns, and charge in with flamethrowers and tanks! All with a giant bottle of olive oil in their crosshairs.

I reached the 10 article limit. Usually one can remove all the cookies but after a bunch of pages and a ton of JS executing it told me I had already ready 10 articles. So how are they doing this? Some kind of super cookie?

Incognito/Private mode. Probably using local storage, but haven't checked honestly.

Check and see if they are using flash cookies. It's amazing how few people check to see what sites have left a trace in flash... especially when all porn sites use it as the defacto standard for videos.

I removed the "ad" from the page with adblock. Had to do two passes as there was another overlay beneath the popup, but it worked just fine after that.

The page pushes a token into the url. Crop it where it makes sense.

The whole extra virgin olive oil thing is weird anyway, other vegetable oils have (probably) better health profiles and a more neutral flavor profile (people aren't just buying it for their salad).

Extra virgin olive oil has a pretty great monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fat ratio and good flavor for salad dressing, eggs, sauces, meat dishes, etc. The only real downsides are low smoke point (some sources say that that means trans fat and other scary stuff can show up at the high temperatures used in stir-frying and deep-frying) and that good flavor != neutral flavor, which is sometimes preferable. Some presses of avocado oil and safflower oil have similarly great mono- to polyunsaturated fat ratios while also having high smoke points. Avocado oil tastes sort of creamy and nutty while safflower is very neutral.

I cook eggs in butter. Eggs in olive oil isn't something I enjoy. And people really are looking for neutral flavors (how else is 'extra light olive oil' a thing?).

I'm not really aware of any reason to prefer monounsaturated fats vs polyunsaturated fats (and other oils beat olive oil on unsaturated vs saturated).

Consuming monounsaturated fat is good for you. Consuming polyunsaturated fat, with the exception of omega-3, is not.

My understanding is that the polyunsaturated fat in virtually all vegetable oils are omega-6 fatty acids, which we consume way too much of relative to omega-3 fatty acids (which are also technically polyunsaturated but which are not present in any significant quantity in such cooking oils), and the huge quantities of omega-6 that almost everyone consumes is believed to increase our risk of numerous diseases, including cancer. Monounsaturated fat, the primary beneficial constituent of so-called Mediterranean diets, and especially the specific monounsaturated fat called oleic acid, is protective against cancer, reduces LDL (bad cholesterol), and possibly raises HDL (good cholesterol).

Just google the URL (without the trailing GET parameters) and click on the first result. That always circumvents the NYT paywall.

I always open such links in a Chrome incognito window. Apparently there is still a page count, but it gets reset every time you open a new window.

Because of this stuff, I only buy my oil at this point from makers who I personally have a connection with, and I know are selling 100% legitimate stuff (a good friend's family has an organic olive grove and press in Sicily, so I buy from that mostly now).

I'm constantly saddened by the fact that more countries don't enforce food labeling regulation, either internally or for import. The US alone could probably fix this problem really fast by banning the import of mislabeled food products with high penalties for the import of poorly labeled ones.

We've always had problems with labeling on food products where demand is vastly ahead of supply. The olive oil situation isn't nearly as bad as the honey situation.

Superior EVOO qualities:

1) high (≥76%) oleic acid content (for oxidative stability); olives from different cultivars and regions can vary from 55-83% oleic acid)

2) low peroxide value (<9, and preferably <6 meq/kg)

3) high (≥350 mg/kg) total phenolics, assayed using caffeic acid equivalents, and

4) harvested not more than 12 months ago

This one is a great candidate: http://amphoranueva.com/store/index.php?p=product&id=182 Veronica Foods - highly trusted (and my only) source of EVOO.

Here is a simple method testing whether the bottle in your kitchen is pure olive oil, or a "mixed" one.

Take the bottle and put it in the refrigerator for 24-36 hours.

If the oil solidifies, it’s monounsaturated and is olive oil.

If the oil remains a liquid, it is polyunsaturated and is NOT olive oil.

This is not a scientific test, meaning, some fake will pass this, however, polyunsaturated results == fake / mixed.

UC Davis and other labs will do adulteration testing including genetic testing.

http://anlab.ucdavis.edu/olives

http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/usda-new-tests...

Dammit, can't they list the 30% or so of brands that aren't known to be adulterated?

It's all adulterated at some point or another. Maybe things are changing with the new EU regs but there is traditionally no brand consistency. I would never buy a bottle of imported olive oil without a taste test. That pretty much necessitates going to an olive oil store (amazingly there's one 5 minutes from me in suburban South Carolina...) and not buying at your local grocer.

Or you can just get the California oils that are known to be good.

Cool slideshow, nice example of a modern webpage.

But is this really what passes for journalism at the NYT now?

No, it's what passes for the web-equivalent of the newspaper graphic.

I can't believe it! All around the world people buying "italian" oil, when the best is the spanish oil, with similar price, more quality and less fraud.

Something about the placement of this cigar... http://i.snag.gy/MiSuO.jpg

Hacker News?

They hacked the olive oil distribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com