by Mueller, Tom
On a more luminous note, olive oil was also a favorite vehicle for the pharmacological and alchemical creativity of Renaissance proto-scientists. The brilliant, fiery, and famously beautiful Caterina Sforza used it widely in her Experimenti, a collection of nearly five hundred medicines, scents, creams, and beauty cures. She derived several of her recipes from magical rituals, and wrote them in code to keep them secret; others were nothing less than X-rated aphrodisiacs and sexual aids, with which she carried on the proud tradition of oil-enhanced sex celebrated by the classical Greeks.
Apart from its use by witches and sexual adventurers, the biggest impetus to olive oil production came from several emerging industries, which exploited the chemical characteristics of olive oil as fatty acid, lubricant, and solvent. In soap-making centers like Marseille and Venice, olive oil was blended in great copper cauldrons with lye, soda ash, and seawater, and the resulting dense, porridgy mixture, a sodium fatty acid salt known in lay terms as soap, was poured into molds to harden. Every woolen mill from Flanders to Florence needed generous supplies of olive oil to soften the yarn before it was woven, since the carding and combing process had removed the lanolin, wool’s natural lubricant. Olive oil was also widely employed in textile-dying and leatherworking.
The mounting demand for olive oil helped to advance olive-growing and oil-making expertise. In his Tesoro dei Rustici (“Treasure of Rustics”), fourteenth-century bolognese poet Paganino Bonafede elucidated the art of planting, grafting, pruning, and fertilizing olive trees in 143 hendecasyllables. Some authorities recommended beating the trees with canes to bring down the fruit, but Umbrian writer Corniolo Della Cornia, like Roman agronomists before him, favored hand-picking because it caused less damage to the branches and produced more oil. Treatises with titles like Panoply of the Agricultural Arts built on and improved the knowledge of the ancients, bringing a new scientific approach to olive oil by classifying cultivars and production regions, and perfecting methods of harvesting, milling, storage, and transportation. Clever engineers began to build olive mills along watercourses, using hydraulic power instead of mules and oxen to turn the millstones; sixteenth-century Tivoli, near Rome, had eighteen water-powered mills. Merchants like Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, a Florentine, helped standardize and regulate oil commerce. In his popular manual Practico della Mercatura (“The Practice of Trade”), Pegolotti describes the different weights and measures used for oil in each major Italian city, and the increasingly close supervision of oil production, quality, and shipping methods being performed in the ports of Puglia.
Puglia, in fact, was the world leader in oil production in the Renaissance as it had been in the Middle Ages, despite the rapid expansion of groves in southern Spain and Greece. Pugliese families like the Scoppa in Barletta and the Rufolo in Molfetta grew rich on the international oil trade, and the Scaraggi family of Bitonto became so wealthy shipping oil to Egypt and Byzantium that they could maintain sales agents in Venice, Alexandria, Constantinople, and other eastern Mediterranean ports. But the most successful merchants in Puglia were foreigners: the Lombards and especially the ever-present Venetians, active in Bari, Molfetta, Barletta, and other major cities in Puglia, whose ships carried pugliese oil throughout the Mediterranean, from Genoa and Mallorca in the west to Tunis, Alexandria, and Constantinople in the south and east.
The market for olive oil became increasingly discerning and sophisticated. Industrialists found they could use cheaper, lower-grade oils like those made from rotten olives, second-pressed from olive pomace with the help of hot water, or slurped out of the “inferno,” a cave-like space beneath the press which caught the waste oil. Producers began to grade olive oils, distinguishing in their contracts and bills of sale between oleo grosso (“coarse oil”) for factories and oleo claro (“fine oil”) for food, the claro being worth twice as much as the grosso. Merchants differentiated among production areas according to the quality of the oils made there: oil from Lake Garda, Gaeta, Tuscany, and the Marche was generally of the highest quality; Puglia, Mallorca, Liguria, and Catalonia of middle grade; and oil from Calabria and Andalucía, though abundant, was widely called “soap-making oil.” (Generally speaking, until the advent of modern oil-making technology and methods over the last four decades, the unrelenting heat of the southern Mediterranean made the production of flavorful, fault-free oil far more difficult than in cooler climes, and to this day the majority of oil made in Calabria and Andalucía is lampante.)
The emergence of industrial oil and a range of oil grades increased the ever-present risk of fraud. Many cities passed strict laws against mixing high-quality oils with lower-grade ones, which yielded inferior blends that might be passed off as higher-priced oil. The fifteenth-century statutes of the oil trade in Verona prescribe penalties for crooked olive millers, and denounce the “new and malicious fraud” of cutting high-grade oil with olive pomace oil, “a bitter, smoky and murky” substance which “even in small quantities utterly spoils a large amount of good oil.” By now the veronesi, like other oil-makers in high-quality but small-scale production areas like Lake Garda and the Marche, were being steadily squeezed out of the business by less prized but high-volume oils from Puglia and Andalucia being marketed by the wily Venetians.
Even low-grade industrial olive oil was subject to fraud, through adulteration with cheaper vegetable oils. In 1618, authorities in London dispensed fines and prison sentences for soap-makers who used anything but pure olive oil. Two decades later, the Livorno-based sales agent of the English wool-weaving company Fairfax and Barnsley wrote to his London partner about the recurrent problem of worm infestation in wool cloth, which he blamed on adulteration. “There is no marvel why the worm breeds in cloths for, since the planting of rapeseed in England, the clothiers have got the trick to mix that oil with olive oil . . . which, lying long packed, breeds a worm.”
As the liquid gold of olive oil flowed from port to port around the Mediterranean and the Levant, cities began to tax it, which in turn fostered tax evasion. In a fifteenth-century trial, oil merchants Alessandro Miniscalchi and Leonardo Pellegrini, scions of two illustrious Venetian families, were charged with systematically defrauding the fisc of La Serenissima. After years of deliberation, the court eventually cleared the accused of all charges, but it did strengthen anti-fraud measures, and authorized oil-crime investigators and customs officers to use “inquisitorial procedures,” even torture, in future cases, “since many frauds are committed these days, following many different methods and routes, this territory being so broad and wide open to all.” Modern oil criminals who evade EU taxes and embezzle EU subsidies are following a time-honored tradition.
Venice’s hold on the olive groves and mills of Puglia began to loosen in the sixteenth century, as the growing Turkish power eclipsed Venetian trade in the Adriatic. As Venetian maritime dominion waned, French, English, and Dutch ships took over the job of carrying oil to the city. Then the city fathers levied a new tax on olive oil just as an outbreak of plague prevented oil ships from entering the port, which wrecked the Venetian oil business and decimated internal consumption. The French, English, and Dutch began to collect oil in pugliese ports themselves and, bypassing Venice, to deliver it directly to foreign manufacturing centers. Most of the profit from Italian olive oil—as well as from oil fraud and tax evasion—now fell into foreign hands. Multinationals which now dominate the olive oil market in Puglia, dictating prices and relabeling pugliese oil as they like, perpetuate a situation that arose in the Middle Ages and was consolidated in the Renaissance.
A SHARP SEAR came at the back of Gary Beauchamp’s throat, together with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. As his eyes filled with tears and he started coughing convulsively, a eureka moment came of the kind that scientists dream of, a chain reaction of interdisciplinary inspirations ricocheting through biochemistry, immunology, and human history. All triggered by one sip of extra virgin olive oil.
Beauchamp, who holds a PhD in biopsychology, directs the Monell Chem
ical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit research institute that studies the chemical underpinnings of smell, taste, and other sensations. His epiphany—the insights of which he’s been following up on ever since—took place in 1999 at Erice, a hill town in western Sicily that overlooks the brilliant blue Tyrrhenian Sea. There he took part in a symposium on a new field of study, termed “molecular gastronomy,” at which chefs and scientists performed a number of culinary experiments, presenting a food or preparing a dish and asking the participants to work out its chemical significance. During one session, Italian physicist Ugo Palma brought out several plastic Coke bottles of olive oil, recently made at his family’s grove outside of Palermo. He poured out three-finger doses of the dark green liquid into wineglasses, distributed them to the gathering, and demonstrated oil-tasting with the strippaggio, the slurp that draws the volatile components up into the nasal passages. After the first sips and slurps, the room erupted in coughs and tearful groans of admiration.
The instant Beauchamp felt that odd burn in the back of his throat, he thought of ibuprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory. Back in Philadelphia, he’d recently spent several months chewing and swallowing doses of ibuprofen during a study commissioned by a pharmaceutical company, which hoped to substitute ibuprofen for acetaminophen, another analgesic drug which they were then using in one of their over-the-counter cough remedies. “Ibuprofen produced this very particular burn in the throat when swallowed,” says Beauchamp. “It’s not like hot peppers, which burn everywhere on your lips, mouth, throat. Ibuprofen produces an entirely different sensory percept, which is extremely localized in the throat, and only happens after you swallow it. Since the sensory qualities of a compound often tell you a lot about its pharmacology, when I felt that ibuprofen-like sensation with olive oil, I realized that they probably had a connection.”
And here the avalanche of questions started. Ibuprofen’s anti-inflammatory properties derive from its inhibition of COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes which cause swelling. Was olive oil also a COX-inhibiting anti-inflammatory? Ibuprofen and other COX inhibitors, in addition to pain relief, have been linked to reduced risk of heart disease and certain forms of cancer. Could olive oil’s mysterious anti-inflammatory do this, too? Was olive oil the key to the Mediterranean diet?
To start answering these questions, Beauchamp brought a Coke bottle of oil back to the Monell lab, where he and his colleagues broke it down into its chemical components and tasted each one to see if that substance burned their throats. They eventually isolated one molecule that did; to ensure that no other chemicals were involved, they synthesized the molecule de novo, dissolved it in tasteless corn oil, and, after waiting many months for FDA authorization to ingest a novel man-made substance, finally swallowed it—and felt the same throaty bite. They named the substance “oleocanthal,” a term they cobbled together from the Latin words for “oil”, “sting,” and “aldehyde” (an organic compound produced by oxidizing an alcohol). Further tests revealed that although oleocanthal had a completely different molecular structure from ibuprofen, it inhibited COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes in a strikingly similar way. Beauchamp and his colleagues later demonstrated that oleocanthal also reduces the adverse effects of ADDLs, highly toxic protein byproducts which are believed to contribute to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease; what’s more, the substance appeared to make ADDLs a better target for antibodies, thus enhancing the effects of immunological therapies for Alzheimer’s.
This potent yet little-known remedy is part of extra virgin olive oil’s “polar fraction,” a delicate cocktail of over one hundred polyphenols, hydrocarbons, vitamins, and other perishable and often volatile compounds which vanish when the oil is treated with chemicals or heat. (They are also known as the “unsaponifiable fraction,” because they are left over when oil is mixed with an alkali to form soap.) Though many of these compounds are poorly understood, they are coming under increasing scrutiny by medical researchers, who are revealing that they possess a wide range of therapeutic properties.
A number of substances in olive oil’s polar fraction shield us from the far-reaching damage done by an essential part of our own body chemistry: oxygen. One of nature’s great ironies is that this element, vital to creating and nourishing life, also accelerates aging and death. Oxygen is required for cell metabolism but produces certain highly reactive byproducts called free radicals, which damage cells, combine with LDL (“bad” cholesterol) to sludge up artery walls, degrade DNA strands leading to malignancies, and break down proteins in the body. By the age of eighty, the proteins in an average person’s body are 80 percent oxidized; oxygen, in other words, is making us go bad. Polyphenols in olive oil such as hydroxytyrosol and secoiridoid aglycones, as well as hydrocarbons like squalene, are potent antioxidants, natural preservatives that protect olive oil from spoilage caused by oxidation, and also help shield tissues in various parts of the human body from the assault of free radicals. Clinical tests suggest that, thanks either to these antioxidant properties or their ability to inhibit cancer-cell proliferation, polyphenols in olive oil also help prevent cancers of the colon, breast, ovary, and prostate gland.
Polyphenols and other substances in olive oil also appear to have cardiovascular benefits, thanks to their anti-inflammatory properties and because they reduce the clotting action of red blood cells, diminishing the risk of thrombosis, stroke, and heart attack. Other compounds act as antibacterial agents, amplifying the immune system’s response to infection. Still others block the sun’s ultraviolet rays, and protect against skin cancer when the oil is spread on the skin. And others, like oleocanthal, appear to guard against neurological damage in degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s.
“A low incidence of cardiovascular disease, dementia, and certain kinds of cancer—these are among the central benefits attributed to the Mediterranean diet,” says Gary Beauchamp. “Since the 1950s, people have accepted that olive oil, the main source of fat in this diet, is the keystone of this dietary regime.” Some of olive oil’s positive effects stem from its monounsaturated fat profile, but, more and more, medical research suggests that the polyphenols and the other “minor components” of olive oil, which constitute a scant 2 percent of its volume, are the main source of oil’s health benefits. These same substances give a high-quality olive oil its pepperiness, bitterness, and other prized sensory properties; in fact, the oil’s healthful properties are directly proportional to the strength of its flavors, aromas, and other sensory characteristics. If an oil doesn’t sting at the back of the throat, it contains little or no oleocanthal. If it isn’t bitter, it’s low in tocopherol and squalene. If it isn’t velvety in texture, then it’s missing hydroxytyrosol. (Table olives, depending on their cultivar and how they’ve been cured, frequently contain high levels of oleic acid, as well as generous doses of polyphenols and the other precious minor components also found in extra virgin olive oil.)
The concentration of these beneficial substances varies widely among oils, from about 50 to 800 milligrams per kilo of oil, depending on factors such as the olive cultivar, where it’s grown, how much water the trees receive, the ripeness of the fruit at harvest, and the milling and extraction methods used. Refined olive oils contain next to no polyphenols, because they and the rest of the polar fraction disappear during the refining process. Yet olive oil labels rarely communicate this crucial health data—most contain just a heart health message about the fatty acids in olive oil, which lumps extra virgin olive oil and refined oil together as one undifferentiated commodity. Gary Beauchamp points out that many health benefits only derive from first-rate oil. “Before researching olive oil, I used to buy any old oil in the supermarket. It was just something to dump over salad. Today, knowing what I know, I’m willing to spend $25 or more for a bottle of high-quality oil.” In fact, it’s the consumption of polyphenol-rich olive oil and the other elements of the Mediterranean diet over the long term that produces most of the diet’s health benefits. “Many Italians at the Erice conference made th
eir own oil from family trees,” Beauchamp remembers. “Often when they were kids, their grandmothers had given them a little cup of oil each morning to drink, like a medicine.”
Given the bitterness and astringency of some quality oils, Beauchamp wonders how people ever tumbled to the notion that olive oil was good to eat. “When I had that first taste of real extra virgin olive oil, the pungency, astringency, and bitterness were overwhelming. For a minute I felt as if I might have done myself harm. Bitterness, for example, usually signals the presence of a substance that’s toxic to some part of our anatomy—medicines are bitter because they’re killing something. So when people eat good olive oil and taste that bitterness, what they’re experiencing is an interaction between a fruit that doesn’t want to be eaten and their organism, which doesn’t want its tissue destroyed. Great olive oil is decidedly an acquired taste. But it’s one we’d all do well to acquire.”
SHORTLY AFTER SPEAKING with Gary Beauchamp, I had dinner with Lanfranco Conte, perhaps the world’s leading authority on olive oil chemistry. He holds the chair of food chemistry at the University of Udine, and also serves as adviser to the International Olive Council in Madrid, the agriculture department of the European Union in Brussels, and the Italian government’s Technical Commission on Oils and Fats in Rome. But among his favorite activities are the olive oil tastings he holds in elementary and middle schools in the countryside around Udine, where we met.
“Before we start tasting the oils,” Conte told me, “I show the children a picture of my cat. I tell them how acute her senses are, while ours have grown dull and need to be trained and sharpened. That always breaks the ice, and they start telling me about their own pets—their dog that recognizes people by smell through closed doors, their grandfather’s goat that knows him by the sound of his footsteps. Then I give each child two glasses of oil, one good and the other bad, and without explaining anything about them, we begin.”