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Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

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Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#101

Post by buboard »

chicob wrote: post #65
jimbokun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what brought you to Hacker News? It's fascinating the variety of people who contribute here, and I'm wondering what would bring a Portuguese farmer to a site centered around technology and entrepreneurship. (I suppose I could equally ask why this site would be discussing a bacterial outbreak in Italian olive trees, and the answer could be "because it's interesting" to both questions.)

I really like Hacker News, and I usually read my tech-related news here first. Farming is kind of the family business, and I love it. I am also a physicist by training, and thus my interest in technology in general. Agriculture is becoming increasingly technological, and everything from farming gadgets to John Deere tractors hacking has come up many times. There are even some Plasma Physics applications to agricultur…

> agriculture is becoming increasingly technological

depends, the european CAP has subsidized old-style agriculture which has left many regions way behind, and the regulatory frameworkd is so tight that, despite the fact that many countries are producing a lot of research (on GMOs for example), it's not likely to ever be used.

I wonder how big is technology adoption in Portugal

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#102

Post by peterwwillis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #89
jimmy1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why you should purchase Extra Virgin Olive oil from Greece, directly from Greece. There is a greek food importer in almost every that has a few Greek restaurant owners where you could go and get the real stuff. Also the irony here is that for the "premium" Italian olive oils, especially the extra virgin, most of the olives come from Greece.

> Which is why you should purchase Extra Virgin Olive oil from Greece, directly from Greece. I think you misspelled “California”. > Also the irony here is that for the "premium" Italian olive oils, especially the extra virgin, most of the olives come from Greece. I thought Spain supplied more of the olives for Italian olive oil, and that was true across grades.

Everywhere in the mediterranean supplies oil for olive oil. And calling it "Italian" is virtually meaningless. Either it comes from a very specific region of Italy so you can taste its local flavor, or it's just an oil blend. The back of the bottle will tell you which countries the oil comes from.

I highly suggest buying from Greece instead of California, if only as a form of financial assistance via trade. Greek products are extremely good, but difficult to get here. There's so little money in Greece that they can't afford to build up the export infrastructure they had a century ago.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#103

Post by buboard »

vanderZwan wrote: post #53

People outside of Italy are probably not aware of how seriously they take the topic of olive oil over there. The label "extra vergine" increases the price so much that there is a huge economic incentive for fraud. To combat this they have a taste police (literally) that checks that olive oil samples are not secretly mixes of fresh and old oil together. They are... quite opinionated, as you can see this exchange from…

In fact a lot of that "Italian" oil is superior Greek oil mixed with italian lampante

https://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/09/21/how-italian-comp...

Greek olive oil exporters have a hard time exporting it to retail , because it is hard to secure the large quantities needed and it varies seasonally. Also a lot of it is consumed domestically, often not even sold in supermarkets, but directly from producers. The rest of it is exported in bulk in cheap prices, mainly in Italy.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#104

Post by reaperducer »

Cyph0n wrote: post #78
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is olive oil- it's just not extra virgin olive oil, produced by olive flesh (i.e. not the seeds) and only by mechanical extraction (i.e. no heat or chemical processing). The fraud is in the fact that it is advertised as extra virgin, the highest recognised quality, when it's not. Also, it is Italian, only not purely so. It is often mixed in with oils from other places. The problem is when the mix-ins are from Nort…

> The problem is when the mix-ins are from North Africa, e.g. from Morocco, which are considered of inferior quality Tunisian here. I'm curious: why is North African olive oil considered inferior?

I'm not an expert here, but I've heard that olives are a lot like grapes. The quality and flavor varies greatly by soil, weather, and climate conditions.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#105

Post by reaperducer »

zozbot123 wrote: post #81
Cyph0n wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is when the mix-ins are from North Africa, e.g. from Morocco, which are considered of inferior quality Tunisian here. I'm curious: why is North African olive oil considered inferior?

Racism, mainly. They say the same thing about Turkish hazelnuts while failing to acknowledge that Turkey is the homeland of hazelnuts and way way older than Italian ones.

Turkey is the homeland of hazelnuts and way way older than Italian ones.

Older !== better. See also: California wine.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#106

Post by mikecaron »

fmihaila wrote: post #60
vanderZwan wrote: post #53

People outside of Italy are probably not aware of how seriously they take the topic of olive oil over there. The label "extra vergine" increases the price so much that there is a huge economic incentive for fraud. To combat this they have a taste police (literally) that checks that olive oil samples are not secretly mixes of fresh and old oil together. They are... quite opinionated, as you can see this exchange from…

> The label "extra vergine" increases the price of oil so much that there is a huge economic incentive for fraud. It's also a huge economic incentive for the Mafia to get involved, according to the Financial Times: https://outline.com/bH8KVt . It is a huge problem, and it doesn't stop at olive oil.

https://youtu.be/gCdXiOssbM0

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#107

Post by reaperducer »

jimmy1 wrote: post #50
mlrtime wrote: post #18

I was pretty shocked to learn that most (~80%) of the Italian extra virgin olive oil that comes into the US is neither Italian or olive oil. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-overtime-how-to-buy-...

Which is why you should purchase Extra Virgin Olive oil from Greece, directly from Greece. There is a greek food importer in almost every that has a few Greek restaurant owners where you could go and get the real stuff. Also the irony here is that for the "premium" Italian olive oils, especially the extra virgin, most of the olives come from Greece.

There is a greek food importer in almost every that has a few Greek restaurant owners where you could go and get the real stuff.

This might explain why I occasionally see Greek restaurants that also sell olive oil, but no other groceries.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#108

Post by protonfish »

btilly wrote: post #70
vanderZwan wrote: post #53

People outside of Italy are probably not aware of how seriously they take the topic of olive oil over there. The label "extra vergine" increases the price so much that there is a huge economic incentive for fraud. To combat this they have a taste police (literally) that checks that olive oil samples are not secretly mixes of fresh and old oil together. They are... quite opinionated, as you can see this exchange from…

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."

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.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#109

Post by riffraff »

hinkley wrote: post #85
vanderZwan wrote: post #53

People outside of Italy are probably not aware of how seriously they take the topic of olive oil over there. The label "extra vergine" increases the price so much that there is a huge economic incentive for fraud. To combat this they have a taste police (literally) that checks that olive oil samples are not secretly mixes of fresh and old oil together. They are... quite opinionated, as you can see this exchange from…

The French use regionalism with wine to control this without sounding... well let’s just say it: racist. I’m surprised there aren’t appellations for Italian olive oil, if they care so much about it being domestic.

italy consumes 3 times as much oil as it produces.

But all bottles have a label that says where the oil or olives come from, it's just that nobody takes time to read it.

And of course, people want 1L of EVOO for 8 euros, not 20, so the big distribution carries mostly those.

Re: Italy’s olive crisis intensifies as deadly tree disease spreads

#110

Post by scalio »

I recently read Biodiversos by Stefano Mancuso and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the slow food movement. It's basically a discussion between the two where they lay out the big problems with our production and consumption of food.

For instance, concentrating on making single kinds as productive as possible instead of cultivating variety is extremely dangerous, as shown by this event. The great Irish famine is maybe the most striking example. Humanity does exactly that with wheat, cows, almost everything. The very basis of most of the globe's food comes from a handful of species. In my mind, this is one of the great ticking bombs of our close future.

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