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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

#151

Post by mynameisvlad »

vanderZwan wrote: post #73
btilly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Interesting! Since that article is from 2011, I wanted to see if there was any follow-up research on that. Using the paper's title as a starting point on Google Scholar I could only find better techniques for checking, but no papers sampling many brands. Then I noticed that the PDF was hosted on "olivecenter.ucdavis.edu"[0]. Going to that website revealed no further research either. In fact, the research tab of their…

It only leads to example.com with JS disabled. It's actually an on-click dropdown menu with three options:

- Projects: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/projects

- Our Reports: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/reports

- UC Olive Database: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/publications

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

#152

Post by josario »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #146
josario wrote: post #84

I'm Italian and I come from Puglia. It strikes me directly. It's a hard punch in the stomach, problem is that people don't want to remove this old trees, they are even centuries old and so they make the disease spread more and more as time progress and as a matter of fact the olive oil selling is their only income. The state failed, they had no direct order to remove the trees nor economical help. As an example in my…

While at the grocery store yesterday I noticed that the store had a few shelves of cutting boards and bowls made of olive wood. They're made from non-producing olive trees in Tunisia. The little blurb on the cutting board suggested that the Tunisians cut down the trees once they stop producing. I wonder if there's enough of a market that producing wood would incentivize cutting down infected trees. The grain is visua…

No, because the infected trees wood is crap and falls apart, it can't be used to make wood items or wooden stuff sadly :( And yes, the tree wood of healthy plants is amazing.

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

#153

Post by Moru »

Retric wrote: post #111
scalio wrote: post #110

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 th…

I don’t know about dangerous. We have a wide range of crops and the loss of a single one is only ever a regional problem. The loss of any one crop be that something minor like strawberries or major like corn is just not that big a deal globally. Now locally yea it can be a huge issue, but the tradeoff of lower productivity every year vs the low odds in any one year of a problem make this fairly complex balancing act.

Google Banana fungus. We don't have a wide range of crops. We have monoculture and a very small set of GMO crops that is used all over the world. For example there is a lot of different rice species but we eat mabe five of them in western countries.

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

#154

Post by phillmv »

chicob wrote: post #51
smackay wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few days in around Beja in Baixo Alentejo this year, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beja,_Portugal The area with new new olive plantations is simply staggering as producers race to capitalize on the shortages in other Mediterranean countries. The fields (in effect, mini prairies) are so large I think this is only going to hasten the spread of disease it will simply be impossible to exercise proper hygiene or…

Thanks! One way to minimize the risk is to quarantine the batches in stub nurseries, and to be as zealous as one can regarding the sanitary passports. In the past, Alentejo had many orchards that, thanks to the State policy of the dictatorial regime, were drastically replaced by large fields for cereal production. This resulted in what is now known as the pseudo-steppe (of a particular ecological interest), which is…

E como era a região, antigamente, antes do Estado Novo? Que interessante.

Só aí à dois anos é que aprendi que o eucalipto que tanto cobria o mato ao redor da aldeia, quando eu era pequeno, não é natural na europa.

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

#155

Post by vanderZwan »

jnurmine wrote: post #140
docbrown wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The first time I tried high quality olive oil >I thought it was unreal For those people who may be having trouble understanding the comparison, this reaction would be the same reaction as if we were tasting supermarket hummus and legitimately homemade hummus. One is McDonalds dry; the other is Michelin star silk.

Yes, exactly! The hummus comparison is spot on. Another example: supermarket guacamole (that green weird-tasting paste) vs. guacamole from real avocados freshly made.

> supermarket guacamole

In the EU, the only requirement for being legally allowed to call something "guacamole" is that it contains avocado as an ingredient. In practice, that is usually a few percentages of avocado powder.

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

#156

Post by vanderZwan »

rocketred wrote: post #126
vanderZwan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are even some Plasma Physics applications to agriculture, so the interdisciplinarity never ends! You can't just casually mention this without further explanation! :D

fun little presentation about it: https://suli.pppl.gov/2018/thursdays/The%20Emerging%20Field%...

Ah, I feel a bit dumb for not realizing what kind of applications these would be, because I really should know better: back in 2002, when I still tried studying physics, I was part of a committee that organized a student symposium on biomedical technology. One of the speakers was Eva Stoffels, who had recently invented a low-energy plasma needle. Believe it or not, she claimed her motivation was ridding the world of the dental drill.

It's actually really interesting what you can do with plasma's in a biomedical context: bacteria are killed off really quickly by them because they lack a cell wall, without destroying human cells. At higher intensities, the plasma first breaks down the proteins connecting cells without killing them. At even higher intensities, they trigger apoptosis: programmed cell death without inflammations. Oh, and cancer cells are less resilient against them.

In the case of Stoffels' plasma needle, the idea was that it would destroy the infection while leaving healthy tissue intact. Not only that, her team found that the plasma's ionized the teeth in such a way that enamel production was increased. It sounded amazing at the time, but I guess it's hard to get this stuff out of the lab into the medical market though, since it has been over fifteen years now.

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

#157

Post by vanderZwan »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #151
vanderZwan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Since that article is from 2011, I wanted to see if there was any follow-up research on that. Using the paper's title as a starting point on Google Scholar I could only find better techniques for checking, but no papers sampling many brands. Then I noticed that the PDF was hosted on "olivecenter.ucdavis.edu"[0]. Going to that website revealed no further research either. In fact, the research tab of their…

It only leads to example.com with JS disabled. It's actually an on-click dropdown menu with three options: - Projects: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/projects - Our Reports: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/reports - UC Olive Database: https://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/publications

You guessed correctly that I had JS disabled. Thank you!

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

#158

Post by trainingaccount »

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…

Can you invert a binary tree?

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

#159

Post by tomohawk »

airstrike wrote: post #72
btilly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"You might raise your eyebrows at the conclusion that Australian and California extra virgin olive oils are purer than most Italian olive oils, since the research was partially funded by the California Olive Ranch and the California Olive Oil Council and has ties with the Australian Olive Association"

California Olive Ranch is a great brand. Can't recommend it highly enough.

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

#160

Post by angott »

riffraff wrote: post #109
hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another problem is that the labeling laws apply only to oil bottles sold in Italy/EU. Most olive oil sold in North America by Italian companies will just say "Product of Italy" without mentioning that the olives used come from Tunisia or other countries. The US and Canadian labeling laws are a joke compared to most European countries, and should definitely improve on this.
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