Your Olive Oil is (probably) a Lie

(soft dramatic music) - Your

olive

oil may not be what it claims to be. says to be - A couple of years ago, in southern Italy, the police were spying on an organized crime network. (Italian speaking person) - Their undercover footage shows these large tankers entering their compound. They began tracking these trucks with GPS and discovered that they were loaded with oil. They delivered this oil to markets and restaurants in Germany. They sold it to buyers who thought they were buying high-quality extra virgin

olive

oil from the best olive-growing areas in the world. (suspense music) After many months of this investigation, the police finally raided the complex and what they found is that these criminals were importing cheap seed oil that cost them just over a euro per liter, but then they colored it with chlorophyll to make it look like olive oil.

They even had the machinery to bottle this oil and label it with the important words extra virgin olive oil with a cute little Italian flag. At the height of their business they were selling around 23,000 liters per week to northern customers for 5 to 10 times the cost at which they bought this cheap seed oil. The police estimated that they collected around €8 million a year. In the end, 24 people were arrested and 150,000 liters of fake olive oil were seized. (Reporter speaking Italian) (soft music) - Good olive oil is very difficult to make. It's delicate, it's hard to ship it all over the world, but when you get the real product, extra virgin olive oil is really healthy and delicious.

And from the southern Italian mafia to the major olive oil brands found on grocery store shelves, olive oil is rife with fraud and deception. In fact, there's a chance you've never tried extra virgin olive oil, even if you think you have. Let me show you how this happened and why it's important. And how you can enjoy authentic extra virgin olive oil. Because I'm telling you, when you do it, when you taste this, it's like no substance on earth. (upbeat music) I've been training lately, I can do 10 pull-ups, which when I started this journey like 10 months ago I could do one, now I can do 10. and that's thanks to CoPilot.

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Thank you CoPilot for allowing me to do 10 pull-ups and for existing and sponsoring today's video. Let's go back to our story about the mafia and olive oil. (upbeat music) Most of the world's olive oil is made here, in these sunny Mediterranean climes. Thousands of years ago, people here discovered that squeezing the fruit of this ancient tree produces a golden oil that is like magic. They worshiped this tree. Its branches were used by the goddess of peace or by a victorious Olympian. It was an olive branch that told Noah that the flood was over. Over the centuries it became a sacred tree with a sacred fruit that produced a sacred liquid.

It was food, it was medicine, it was fuel, it was a cosmetic, it was a key part of the religious rituals of the people of the Mediterranean for thousands of years. The rest of the world didn't know much about this special oil until the 1960s, when an American doctor was conducting a health study of more than 13,000 middle-aged men from seven countries. He discovered that people in Italy and Greece lived longer and were generally healthier, despite being devastated by war and poverty. He concluded that it must be because of what they ate, fish, nuts, vegetables and, of course, copious amounts of olive oil instead of butter. (upbeat music) Word soon spread to the rest of the world that this Mediterranean diet was the way to live longer and that olive oil was a key ingredient.

It's the 70s and 80s and everyone is talking about olive oil. - Major health headline here tonight and it's about a very popular diet, the olive oil-rich Mediterranean diet. - Olive oil. - Olive oil - Extra virgin olive oil. - What is the best olive oil? - A little olive oil, or if you like, use a lot. - Between 1958 and 2019, global olive oil production tripled. Demand in the United States skyrocketed. Olive oil is no longer something regional. By the 1990s, this had become a huge international supply chain serving customers around the world who were willing to pay, much more, for this extra virgin olive oil.

What scientists said was an elixir of health and longevity. - You can combine what is beneficial for health with what the taste really is. And people, of course, soon understand the importance of combining good nutrition with good health. - Suddenly, these small olive oil operations in rural southern Italy have international customers clamoring to purchase their product. Then they start selling their oil to middlemen who can take it and sell it to a cooperative. The cooperative gathers all the oil and then sells it to another cooperative who ultimately sells it to a company that bottles it and then ships it to a faraway country to put on grocery store shelves.

This complex supply chain with all these middlemen offers many opportunities for people to take advantage of this new love for this magical and expensive oil. But to understand the olive oil fraud, you must first understand the magic of extra virgin olive oil. (mysterious music) Every winter, on Mediterranean farms, farmers head to their groves to comb the branches of these centuries-old trees at just the right moment so that this delicate fruit is perfectly ripe when it falls to the ground, carpeting the floor of the grove. . The clock immediately starts ticking. Within 24 hours they must take this precious fruit to the oil mill where the olives are crushed and then centrifuged in a centrifuge until the oil is separated.

No heat, no filters, no chemicals, nothing. Only high quality olives quickly pressed once and centrifuged, then bottled, then, crucially, kept dark, fresh, sealed and ideally consumed within 18 months. Achieving this is a delicate process that requires a lot of resources, and even more so when you have to send it all over the world. But it's really the only way to get this magical liquid we call extra virgin olive oil. The things that are good for your heart, your brain and your bones. Which tastes like greasy, herbaceous gold. This is so good. And this is where I tell you that most olive oil is kind of a lie.

Sometimes a white lie and other times a mafia is deceiving you with some kind of lie. First things first: Italian olive oil is important here. If you look at this price chart for Italian olive oil, you will see that it is significantly more expensive than olive oil from the other big players in this space, Spain and Greece. Italian olive oil is more expensive, not only because it is known for its genuine quality, but also because it is Italy. Italy is Italy, it looks like this. Your food looks like this. Italy is perceived to be the epicenter of gourmet food in the world.

So people, including me, are willing to pay more for Italian extra virgin olive oil because it is good and it is from Italy. On that point, let me show you two types of crazy maps. First look at where most olive oil is made in Italy. They are the darkest areas down here. And secondly, let's look at the regions of Italy where the mafia is most present. Right here next to this toe and the heel of the boot. The regions with the highest olive oil production are the regions where the mafia is and this is where everything comes together.

There is this ancient trading city right on the toe of the boot. (soft dramatic music) The Calabrian mafia, one of the most influential clans in Italy, controls this busy port city. They also control or influence much of the farmland in this area, including the olive groves. In 2016, this mafia clan was shipping cheap, low-quality, chemically treated olive oil called pumice. They would then bottle it and label it as extra virgin olive oil from Italy, even though it was as a derivative of chemically treated olive oil and not from Italy. But then they would ship this olive oil to importers in New York City, Boston, and Chicago.

Importers who thought they were buying the best olive oil in the world in the best region in the world. But in reality they were paying for cheap oil and giving huge profit margins to the mafia that committed this fraud. The Italian food police, which is literally a thing, eventually thwarted this plan. - We arrest one of the most powerful street gangs in Calabria. - Olive oil is difficult to detect as fake. More or less everything seems the same. You have to have a trained eye to know if the color is wrong. Most people don't drink olive oil, cook with it, or put it on their salad and just assume that it's legit and provides them with health benefits.

And many people don't really know what good olive oil tastes like. Fraud in olive oil is therefore particularly easy. And particularly lucrative, due to the higher price that a good extra virgin olive oil demands. Because of this, Italy has an entire investigation unit dedicated to food fraud, and they are regularly dismantling these fraud schemes. Some of them are less extreme than the ones we've talked about. A very common one is that people ship olive oil from Spain, they bottle it in Italy and then they put a label on it that says it is Italian olive oil and they sell it at a higher premium because Italian olive oil has a higher price. high. price.

But many times it is even more subtle than that. Olive oil companies will mix extra virgin olive oil with old or decaying oil or they will use olives that have been sitting in the orchard soil for a couple of weeks and say, hey, we'll just press them. anyway and call it extra virgin olive oil. And it's not, it's something else. Again, this is a really complex supply chain with lots of opportunities for people to step in and swap this delicate liquid called extra virgin olive oil for something else, and it's really hard to detect. Much of this olive oil ends up on your supermarket shelf with a photo of a humble Italian farmer in an idyllic landscape with words like cold pressed or premium selection with mock seals of approval that mean nothing.

I mean, listen, these could all be legit extra virgin olive oils, but I don't know because here in the US we don't really have enforcement standards. Fortunately, scientists have proven it. One of the first major tests of this was done by researchers at UC Davis, a universityin California. They went out and bought a lot of olive oil in stores in California. They tested them to see if they met the standards for extra virgin olive oil and found that 69% of imported olive oil that claimed to be extra virgin did not meet the internationally recognized sensory standards, where an expert tests it and can say if is. actually extra virgin or not.

And of those, 31% did not meet chemical standards, meaning they were too acidic. Much of this is not extra virgin olive oil. Now I'm sure I'll get an email from people in the olive oil industry saying that this study isn't actually legitimate because it was just a sample of the olive oil in California stores. But this was actually just one of several studies over the years that have shown the same thing. Most of the olive oil on our shelves claims to be that amazing golden liquid that is delicately produced and stored and contains the fullness of flavor and health benefits of olives, also known as extra virgin olive oil, the Most of these labels lie.

Now most of the oil in these bottles comes from olives. As if there isn't a lot of that fraud where they are like taking seed oil and pretending that it is olive oil that has been restricted. It still happens, but not very often. But then again, the fact that it is made from olives is not what makes extra virgin olive oil special. This is how it is done. It's the way it's processed. It's how quickly they get the fruit out of the orchard, press it, bottle it, store it and ship it. This oil is not that.

She is no longer extra virgin. And yet, they put a label on it so that you and I feel like we are getting the best and at a good price. You would be in big trouble if you are caught labeling it as such in Italy and many European countries. But wait, why haven't these companies that are doing it in the United States gotten into trouble? Because in the United States we don't care. Whereas in Italy they literally have laws that are violated when something is labeled as extra virgin olive oil and it is not. Here in the United States we don't have laws for this.

Companies do not have to test their olive oil to prove that it is extra virgin. They can just import them and put extra virgin on the label and no one can do anything about it. Between this and the fact that most Americans

probably

don't know what extra virgin olive oil is like, so they don't know what to expect. The United States has become what one expert calls the dumping ground for olive oil that says it is extra virgin and is not. So is there any hope here? Will you ever be able to try authentic extra virgin olive oil that is like a magical golden liquid?

If you can. Exists. You just need to know what to look for. We've put together a list of tips on how to find legit extra virgin olive oil and know you're getting the good stuff. I'll put the link in the description. It is everything, from the material the bottle is made of to the nuances in packaging and labeling, including the date, quality seals. We also give you some ideas about some of the tricks that companies try to fake it to make it look legitimate, but it really isn't. So that link is in a description. If you want to try extra virgin olive oil, get it, and are willing to pay for it because, spoiler alert, it's more expensive than the fake stuff that pretends to be real, then you can check out that document and hopefully it's helpful.

The point is that it is possible and I guess if you are still here watching this video you are wondering why is this so important? Why do we talk about fraud in oil and olive oil? And there are a couple of answers. Number one is that this is a really amazing ancient tradition. It is a tradition that fueled Mediterranean civilizations for thousands of years. The harvesting, pressing, packaging and consumption of olive oil, good olive oil, is an ancient and delicate tradition. And when you mix capitalism with that, it often creates a race to the bottom to determine who can make it the cheapest and sell it the cheapest so they can make the most money.

And you will inevitably find opportunistic people who will try to trick you into believing it is real so that you will pay for it. And this hurts the producers who are actually doing the resource-intensive process of harvesting and processing this the right way. And at the end of the day, for me, it's worth it. A good extra virgin olive oil is like no other. A few years ago I discovered that I had never tried extra virgin olive oil. So I bought my first bottle. It was a little expensive, it was like $25 and I started using it on everything.

I even started drinking it raw just to get the flavor because I'm a little weird and that's what I do and I'm sorry, but it's just delicious. And I began to understand why these things became so sacred to so many cultures in the Mediterranean. Why it is as part of all major religions. Why it has endured as a culinary and health staple. And I guess knowing how valuable this liquid is I understand why scammers and the mafia got involved here, why they tried to trick us into thinking that we are consuming the most magical liquid on earth, even if we are not. (upbeat music) Thanks for watching the video.

Am I too obsessed with olive oil? Is that a thing? Because I really like it and I had to make this video because I think in this video it was me being obsessed with olive oil and also me being so frustrated when the international economy ruins us. opportunistic corporations. Like those two things come together, that's what this video is. So thanks for watching. I hope you know the document on how to buy good olive oil that we put together in the description. I want to thank those who support us on The Newsroom, which is our Patreon.

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