Reinventing Olive Oil
Large olive producers, civil servants, and scientists get together.
Their aim: to transform olive oil manufacture.
Their market: an international one beyond the Mediterranean that will pay twice the current rate for a high quality oil.
Their means: industrial-scale processing with the highest tech machinery; financial incentives for new ways of processing; technical books and papers on oil extraction; and a reorganization of farm labor.
When was this? Not the late twentieth century but the late eighteenth century.
A Genoese-style heavy duty oil mill and press from one of the new manuals on olive oil production by Domenico Grimaldi, Istruzioni sulla nuova manifattura dell’olio introdotta nel Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1777).
And here’s the story. Producing olive oil was an ancient technology around the Mediterranean, a blessing because it grew on all those rocky areas that would not support the staff of life, the cereals. The ancient Greeks had even managed to create a large export industry.
But olive oil cost a lot more than oil from oil seeds. Mediterranean production stagnated. Large landowners wrung their hands because they had few other sources of income.
Then, in the mid eighteenth century, the bigger producers saw their chance. Watch and clock manufacturers, now hitting their stride with a rapidly growing market for what had been a luxury product, needed a high quality lubricant. So did the engineers and industrialists who were building the steam engines and looms that powered the British Industrial Revolution.
Traditionally ripe olives that had been allowed to ferment before processing to get the maximum possible yield. Picking the olives earlier, starting processing immediately, and using new machinery produced a transparent, long lasting oil that did not go rancid and was the best available lubricant of the day.
In trading centers such as Genoa and Provence new machinery was introduced and the peasants were pressured to change their work routines. The poor could no longer afford oil (something similar happened in the late twentieth century when the Olive Oil Council succeeded in persuading Americans and northern Europeans to embrace olive oil as part of the Mediterranean Diet. Many around the Mediterranean went over to sunflower oil).
The new low-acidity lubricant oil brought in more revenue. The wealthy also came to think this lubricant oil was healthier and tasted better, and of course it was more expensive so hence more prestigious. “A taste for low-acidity olive oil became a mark of the affluent Mediterranean bourgeoisie.” The pungent flavor of traditional olive oil was not for “delicate tables.”
The massive social restructuring and industrial-scale organization that produced modern olive oil is the missing chapter in the commonly-told story.
Olive oil. Wikipedia.
The history of olive oil on web sites, on bottles, and in books and magazines usually skips straight from some mythic peasant past to the EVVO on the shelves today. As Anne Meneley says, recent claims about the health benefits of olive oil “combine with narratives about olive oil’s ‘ancientness’ and ‘naturalness’ to make it a very successful food commodity in an era of global concern about the risks of ‘industrial food.”
Hmm.
The main argument is drawn from Enlightened Mills. Mechanizing Olive Oil Manufacture in Mediterranean Europe. Technology and Culture, 2004, 45: 277-304 by Massimo Mazzotti, now in the History Department at UC Berkeley.
More historical background in John Muendel, “Friction and Lubrication in Medieval Europe: the Emergence of Olive Oil as a Superior Agent,” Isis, 86. (1995), 373-393
On the recent marketing of olive oil, Anne Meneley, “Like an Extra Virgin,” American Anthropologist, 109 (2007), 678-687.
D. Grigg, “Olive Oil, the Mediterranean, and the World,” Geographical Journal, 53 (2001), 163-72.
