by Mueller, Tom
Regarding the idea that major oil companies had known that some of the oil they bought from Ribatti was adulterated, he made no comment, but later observed that caveat emptor was the golden rule in the olive oil trade, even when it came to chemical testing. “You don’t pay anything up front. Test first, then pay—otherwise you don’t pay. And if everything turns out all right, that means that you”—here Marseglia paused and raised his eyebrows significantly, then laughed—“that you were in on the scam! Pure logic, see?” He winked and said, “You’ll get the 100 percent truth only from us, because we’re out of the [olive oil] business.”
Marseglia is another oilman who grew up in the olive oil culture of southern Puglia, buzzing like an eager bee around his father’s small mill in Ostuni, where there were 108 such mills when he was a child. “When nobody knew where I was, because I wasn’t at home, they could always find me at the mill—it was a sure thing.” He remembers his father bending down to pick up an olive that had fallen to the ground, which otherwise would have been lost—much like the women in the painting in the foyer of Casa Olearia. “Which taught me that from little drops you could even make the sea. . . . I also learned the drive to make quality oil, which was my father’s obsession. In fact, we were the first to produce edible olive oils, at a time when everyone else in the area made lamp oil, lampante.”
He said that most Italians still know surprisingly little about olive oil quality. “There’s a lot of mystification, of outright ignorance. Even many producers can’t tell you if their oil is good or bad: it’s good because it comes from their olives, because they harvested at the right time, blah blah blah. And they say that folks should eat stuff which comes from the countryside, that there’s no need to taste the oil or test it—no, this isn’t right. Here tradition is clouding the facts, how things really are.”
Marseglia told me that he came into conflict with the local oil culture when he began to import olive oil from abroad, to improve the quality of low-grade local oils. Here he began writing figures on a pad in front of him, in a large, slanting, but legible hand. “Italy produces 300,000 tons of oil. 300,000 tons more [of imported oil] are required to satisfy internal demand, and an additional 400,000 for exports, more or less. So you have to import 600,000 to 700,000 tons per year. In Puglia this oil has a very high value. If you import into Tuscany or Molise, where people are selling extra virgin olive oil at €10, €15, nobody pays any attention, but in Puglia, the ship arrives and people say, ‘Fuck!’ And since we imported a lot, to make blends to save many bad, smelly local oils, people basically saw it as an affont. As if we were stealing income from poor folks.”
Marseglia estimated that 98 percent of olive oil sold in Italy as extra virgin isn’t actually top-grade oil. “The law says up to 0.8 percent [free acidity] and no taste defects, that’s it. I think that’s how it should be. How it should be, but not how things are.” He drew a pie chart showing what he considered the real quality of olive oil in the world: 2 percent excellent oil; 8 percent second-tier oil, good but not exceptional; and the remaining 90 percent what he called “so-so oil.” Since excellent oil was far too scarce to meet consumer demand, he explained, olive oil companies sold second- and third-tier oil as extra virgin. “It’s anything but extra virgin, the oil we have here,” he said, indicating the second- and third-tier oils in his diagram. “It’s decent oil, sure, but, if we want to talk about ‘excellent,’ it’s not.”
He didn’t seem to think that this was a problem. “First of all, let’s give people good oil,” he said. “Then the excellent—all the extraordinary stuff at €40 or €50 a kilo, which a few idiots in the world can afford—we’ll think about that later, no?” He told me that his family uses ordinary oil: “For us, the concept of ‘good’ is enough. We want to be average folks.”
Over lunch in the Casa Olearia canteen, Marseglia showed me what he meant by good oil. The strippaggio and other elaborate taste-testing methods used by olive oil sommeliers were “all hot air,” he said. “Tasting a plate of pasta is easy. Tasting a glass of wine is easy. Tasting a piece of fruit is easy. Tasting oil is the same. It has to have the same pleasurable tastes. If it has an unpleasant one, it’s not good—that’s pretty simple. They say you need a lot of knowledge to understand it, because they want to make the subject seem more intellectual.”
He reached across the table for a bottle of Giusto, his company’s supermarket label, unscrewed the cap, and pointed it at me. “Smell this. Does it smell good, or stink?” It smelled good: a tart, intensely fresh fragrance that I’d come to associate with coratina olives.
Marseglia brought the bottle to his lips and tipped in two big glugs. “So you put it in your mouth, right?” he said thickly, through the oil. “Either it’s disgusting, and you spit it in somebody’s face, or it’s good.” The sign of a good oil, he went on, is the bocca bella (“pretty mouth”), the pleasant taste and clean sensation that remain in the mouth after you’ve swallowed the oil.
Marseglia passed me the bottle. “Now you taste it, without doing what those other guys do,” he said. “Pretend you’re eating a candy, something good. Then we’ll see how it leaves your mouth.” He watched my face intently as I swallowed the oil, then nodded, satisfied. “Tasting things is simple,” he said.
IN 1994, eighty agents from the Guardia di Finanza raided Casa Olearia and seized documents detailing four illegal shipments of oil involving the Mazal II and the Katerina T. In July 1996, an arrest warrant was issued for Marseglia and sixteen business associates, on charges that included contraband, European Community tax fraud, and operating a criminal network. Three weeks later, Marseglia, accompanied by his lawyer, surrendered to the authorities and was jailed. Prosecutors accused him of importing Tunisian olive oil falsely identified as a product of Europe, thus evading the duty imposed on non-European goods, and of illegally receiving European olive oil subsidies when, later, he sold the oil. Domenico Seccia, the prosecutor in the case, who also prosecuted Ribatti, believes that Marseglia taught Ribatti the criminal techniques for which Ribatti was eventually convicted. “Ribatti inherited from Marseglia all the methods and procedures of the fraud,” Seccia told me. “The Marseglia case is identical to Ribatti’s.”
In a ruling on January 13, 1997, Italy’s Supreme Court noted that the magistrate who authorized the arrests of Marseglia and his associates had “amply demonstrated, with documentary evidence, that the product unloaded in Monopoli was extra-EC olive oil from Tunisia, free from import tariffs, which was subsequently made to appear to be Italian olive oil using false sales transactions, resulting in serious EC fraud.” The court also noted that the magistrate had ordered the men’s arrests because of what he considered “the concrete risk that similar activities would be repeated,” and because of the “criminal character of the defendants.” Nonetheless, after years of judicial wrangling, the prosecutors were unable to win convictions, and the charges against Marseglia and his associates were dismissed in 2004, when the statute of limitations expired.
Leonardo Marseglia’s problems with the law continue, however. In late 2010, he and five associates were tried at a closed hearing in Bari on charges relating to another olive oil crime, this one involving the United States. According to documents compiled by investigators of the Guardia di Finanza, between 1998 and 2004 Casa Olearia evaded more than €22 million (about $30 million) in EU duties by illegally importing 17,000 tons of Turkish and Tunisian olive oil, apparently with the cooperation of Italian customs officials. EU law allows non-European companies to ship oil duty-free to Italy for processing by an Italian company; however, investigators say that AgriAmerica, the American firm that Casa Olearia says imported the oil, was a shell company created by Marseglia in order to evade customs duties. The oil was processed in the Casa Olearia laboratories, where investigators suspect that it was mixed with vegetable oils, though they have been unable to prove this. Some of the oil was bought by Italian companies, but the bulk was shipped to distributors in the United States, w
ho sold it as Italian olive oil. According to Guardia di Finanza investigators, AgriAmerica customers included some of the largest olive oil distributors in America, including East Coast Olive Oil (now part of the Portuguese food giant Sovena), America’s leading olive oil importer and private label bottler; the supermarket group Wakefern Food; and Sysco, the biggest food service distributor in North America. (There is no evidence that these companies knew the origin of the oil they bought from Marseglia.) The fact that most people don’t associate these names with olive oil shows how completely the business is in the hands of intermediaries, and how many middlemen stand between the consumer and the groves.
Marseglia and his co-defendants have been charged with forming a criminal network for the purpose of committing contraband. A verdict in the case is expected in late 2011, but an investigator familiar with the case says that Marseglia is unlikely to be convicted. “He has protection at the highest levels, from right to left across the political spectrum,” the investigator told me. (Marseglia, citing the ongoing nature of the case, declined to comment on the charges against him but said that he expected to be found innocent, as he had been in previous investigations.) Casa Olearia remains a member in good standing of ASSITOL, which has considerable influence in both Rome and Brussels. The head of the Casa Olearia oil laboratory, Mario Renna, like the lab heads of several other ASSITOL members, belongs to the Italian government’s Technical Commission on Oils and Fats, the government group that helps draft olive oil regulations.
Despite its policy of expelling members with legal difficulties, ASSITOL seems unconcerned about the past legal troubles of Leonardo Marseglia’s company Casa Olearia. “It’s true, fifteen years ago they did some big frauds,” Colavita told me in 2006. “They imported extra [virgin olive oil] calling it seed [oil], and vice versa.” But according to Colavita, those days are over. “For the last ten years he’s 100 percent clean,” Colavita said of Marseglia. “He wasn’t before, but a lot [of companies] weren’t, starting with the big ones.”
OLIVES SACRED AND PROFANE
Silently, the olive is reading within itself the Scriptures of the stone.
—Yannis Ritsos, “Lady of the Vines”
While European horizons darken under the haze of uncertainty and disorder, Italy offers the world a marvellous spectacle of composure and discipline, of civic and Roman strength. Nations who do not know us, or who know us merely through literature, are today amazed by our economic, political and military presence. . . . It is, therefore, a great olive branch that I hold high, between the end of the fourteenth and the fifteenth years of the Fascist Era. But beware, this olive tree grows in a vast forest: a forest of eight million well-sharpened bayonets, held by men who are young, intrepid, and strong.
—Benito Mussolini, speech of October 24, 1936
Apath runs past my house, angling up the steep slope between dry-wall terraces faced with granite and pink limestone, where grape vines climb trellises of wild chestnut branches bleached by the sun to the color of bone. On a map of the area drawn by French surveyors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after Napoleon had pocketed Liguria during his conquest of Italy, it appears as an “ancient roadway.” It’s at least as old as the Middle Ages, and a local historian believes it dates to Roman times, perhaps even to the Iron Age. These days it’s only traveled by a few elderly farmers; the earth is soft underfoot between the uneven cobbles, and large stretches of its course are overgrown in summertime by clover and thyme and wild mint. Yet the landscape still respects this ancient route: the terraces defer to its straight, sharp vector, and the medieval farmhouses on either side face toward it like people around a campfire, glad for its company and movement and clatter of trade, its news from the wider world. The path was here before every other thing in this landscape, and everything is oriented to it.
Everything except one. As the path crosses a saddle on the hillside a hundred meters above my house, a charmed spot where the sunlight lingers in the afternoons and spring violets bloom weeks earlier than in the valley below, it makes a small horseshoe bend, where centuries of travelers have taken five extra steps to avoid something in their way. This ancient obstacle is an olive tree, squat and thick-trunked like the local farmers, its partially exposed roots gripping the soil like a pair of old hands. The bark is pierced with holes made by woodworms, birds, nails, and what may have been bullets (during World War II, partisans sometimes hid from the Fascists and Nazis inside the hollow trunks of giant olive trees). Inside the trunk there’s a patch of charred wood from some wildfire beyond living memory, which must have devastated the tree. But in the fiercely patient way of olives, green shoots grew up from the charred remains and the tree was reborn. Like the mythic olive tree on the Acropolis cherished by the Athenians as the talisman of their city, which burned in the Persian sack of 480 BC but sprouted anew the next day from its smoking stump, a sign that the city would survive and prosper despite the disaster. Or like the olive tree at the head of the bay in Ithaca, which Odysseus sees when he finally returns there after his epic voyage, the one fixed point in a landscape altered by long absence, which tells him that he’s home.
Until I moved here ten years ago, this detail made no sense to me: why would Homer have chosen an olive tree to make Odysseus realize he’s back in Ithaca, and not, say, the generous curve of the bay, or the familiar silhouette of the surrounding hills? Then I began to notice the olive tree on the hill behind my house as I returned each day from my own modest odysseys. Somehow it was that tree, and not the old stone path or the shape of the horizon or even the roofline of my house, that I looked for. It seemed natural to think of the tree in mythic terms. It has watched a procession of peasants, priests, Napoleonic soldiers and Renaissance mercenaries, highwaymen and barefoot saints walk down this roadway and vanish into the sandstorm of time. It seems as permanent a part of this landscape as the hillside itself, the pink limestone cliffs across the valley, or the bright blue ribbon of sea beyond them, where Corsica floats like a dream on clear mornings. Yet despite the tree’s mass and hoary tenacity, you know it’s mortal: it can be killed back by drought or poison, or cut off tomorrow by frost or a saw. The rings in its trunk mean more than a geologic record, the neat strata on a canyon wall: their lean and fat years capture the history of this community, the hardships and plenty of people who have tended this tree for generations, and in turn have been fostered by it. Until recently its oil lit every home in the village, made machines run smoothly, cured the villagers’ ailments. Its oil still feeds them, and its branches hang in their houses throughout the year, distributed at Eastertime by the parish priest as reminders of patience, courage, strength. This olive tree stands for our community, and its oil is the essence of this place.
That a tree can live so long, and spin its wondrous juice from photosynthesized sunlight and a little rainwater sucked from the rocky soil, is itself miraculous. No wonder the ancients held this lifegiving, wondrously tenacious tree to be sacred, and its oil to be the gift of Athena, Aristaeus, and Hercules. And no wonder this vital active ingredient of the classical world seeped deeply into the three great monotheistic religions which arose there, giving the rites of the Hebrews, Christians, and Muslims the luster of oil and filling their sacred texts with images of gnarled, gray-green trees.
COOKBOOKS, LIKE HISTORIES, are written by the victors. When the Germanic tribes of northern and eastern Europe overran the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they revolutionized its culinary fashions and brought the revenge of animal fat on imperial oil. These woodland hunters and pastoralists, who dressed in skins and furs instead of linen togas and silken tunics, introduced a Germanic nouvelle cuisine based not on the Greco-Roman triad of bread, wine, and olive oil but on meat, beer, and animal fat. The tastes of the new masters of empire soon caught on. Pork was included together with oil in the annona, the distribution of free food made to Roman citizens living in the capital. Forests came to be measured not in hectares but in hogs—the space that a
pig grazed in a day. On illustrated calendars, December scenes of the olive harvest familiar to the Greeks and Romans gave way to pigs battening on woodland acorns, and the hog slaughter. Classical authors, who had formerly described the barbarian predilection for animal fat with bewilderment or disgust, now celebrated it: Anthimus, a learned philosopher and physician at the court of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, described the wondrous qualities of lard, which he said the northlanders used as a dressing for vegetables and every other sort of food, and even ate raw as a kind of cure-all: “For them it is such a remedy that they have no need for other medicines.”
In the sea of barbarian beer, butter, and lard that washed over the ancient empire, Christian monasteries and cathedrals formed isolated islands of old-fashioned oil expertise. Olive oil remained a vital ingredient in the worship, economy, health, and daily diet of the Christian clergy, and through them, in the lives of the faithful. To make their holy oils and light their churches, monks and priests needed steady supplies of olive oil. To this end, church councils decreed the protection of olive groves, sometimes prohibiting the cutting of even a single tree. Olive oil was often used as an alternative currency, and commanded a premium price: in high medieval contracts, three to five liters of oil had the same value as a fat hog. Monk-agronomists tended the olive groves and made oil on their communal lands according to the advice of Cato, Columella, and other classical authorities, whose tracts they could consult in their monastic libraries. As the Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, their national diets entered into tension with the dictates of the Church, especially during fast days, when Christians were forbidden to eat meat and animal fat. For 100 to 150 days each year—Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and a range of other holidays and vigils that were determined by local custom—good Christians used olive oil instead of suet or lard to cook and season their food.