by Mueller, Tom
“The law calls for the total absence of defects in an extra virgin olive oil,” Mugelli said. “The law mentions no exceptions or special lenience.”
“So in theory,” Andreas März replied, “after 2002 the world of extra virgin oil should have undergone a revolution. If the law actually worked, extra virgin oil should be a real rarity?”
“It ought to have, yes. But in reality, nothing has changed.”
“This means that the new law has outlawed most extra virgins currently on the market?”
“Precisely!” Mugelli agreed.
“So long as smelly, rancid oils and first-rate oils with the perfume of fresh olives bear the same name,” März wrote, “quality producers in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean have no possibility of covering their costs. So long as olive producers are unable to earn a fair profit for their olives and their oil, groves around the Mediterranean will continue to die out. The leaders of the oil industry know what a clear differentiation among oil quality grades would mean for them. Putting consumers in the position to be able to choose between quality and quantity could threaten their sales. Carapelli apparently wants to avoid this threat by filing suit against one of the most inflexible and independent experts: Marco Mugelli.”
In March 2006, soon after the interview appeared in print, Carapelli sued Andreas März for libel. They sought crushing damages, which, if granted by the judge, would cost März his home, his farm, and his livelihood.
When I visited März later that month, he and several Albanian hired hands were pruning his groves, and the air was pungent with smoke from the burning green cuttings. An old Tuscan adage says that when a tree is properly pruned, a swallow can pass through its branches in flight; extensive pruning, like green-pruning in grapes, helps concentrate the tree’s energies on making olives rather than wood, and allows air and light to reach the fruit so it can mature properly. His trees, which number 4,000, grew scattered across the steep slopes, and were four to five meters tall—mere shrubs compared to the massive grandfather trees of southern Italy. About a meter up their short gray trunks, a few gnarled limbs curved outward and upward, creating chalices to catch the sunlight. The branches were densely covered with small, oval leaves, gray-green above and silvery beneath, which glimmered when a breeze turned them. März explained that these trees were regrowths after the 1985 frost.
Making extra virgin oil is expensive in hillside Tuscany, where land, labor, and materials are expensive. The harvest, which can account for over half of the total cost of making extra virgin olive oil, must be done largely by hand, not only because of the steep terrain but because hand-picking is the best way to avoid bruising the fruit—bruising triggers enzymatic processes associated with decomposition that spoil the flavor and aroma of the oil.
März was cordial but reserved until lunchtime, when he began to unwind. We walked out of the trees and into his low stone farmhouse, where, on our way to the kitchen, he selected a few of the dozens of olive oil bottles which sat in clusters just inside the door, in the hall, and at the foot of the stairs, samples that he had just reviewed in the latest issue of Merum. The kitchen was the largest room in the house, with walls of caramel-colored stone and ceiling beams as thick as a galleon’s mainmasts. It was filled with a ravishing atmosphere of spices and herbs frying in oil, produced by März’s wife Eva, who was maneuvering burnished copper pans over the blue flames of an enormous, professional-quality gas range. “I love to cook, and we both love to eat, so we allowed ourselves this extravagance,” she said, gesturing at the broad kitchen with one of her pans. “Sometimes we spend the entire day in here, cooking and tasting all kinds of foods.”
“And drinking,” Andreas März added, handing me a flute of prosecco. “It’s part of my job, after all.” As we talked, the couple’s two sons, now in their early twenties, drifted in, poured themselves wine, suggested in Tuscan or Swiss dialect a refinement to one of Eva’s dishes, or took a pan and started cooking something else. This appeared to be a routine lunch at the März homestead.
März set the olive oil bottles he’d collected in a row on the kitchen table, a slab of age-polished oak fifteen feet on a side. Some were tall and slender-necked, others squat and square-shouldered like hip flasks, still others were colorful one-liter tins. He placed two white plastic cups beside each container, and poured samples for us to taste.
Like most oil-makers I’ve met, März loves to introduce people to real extra virgin oil, and watch their faces as they begin to realize what they’ve been missing. “I have a lot of visitors from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere in northern Europe, and many have never seen fresh olives before. I give them a handful and say to rub the olives, stick their noses in, and sniff—to really get physical with the fruit. And I say, ‘This is what real extra virgin oil smells and tastes like, because this is the fruit it’s made from.”
He said that many northern Europeans were initially repelled, like Saint Hildegard of Bingen eight centuries earlier, by the bitterness and throat-burn of many first-class oils. Some Germans have reported olive oils to health authorities as adulterated because of these qualities—which are actually good evidence of authenticity. “People with no experience in the Mediterranean normally prefer mild, sweetish, slightly oxidized olive oils with very little character, just as, when people try wine for the first time, they usually prefer a mild vin de pays or a cheap Chianti to a big-bodied Barolo with heavy tannins. Which is perfectly fine—great oils and great wines are acquired tastes, and you need time to appreciate their subtleties, the variations from one locality or harvest to another. But the labels have to be accurate, so you get what you pay for. Just as you can’t put ‘Barolo’ on a bottle of cheap table wine, you shouldn’t be able to put ‘extra virgin’ on a bottle of piss-poor, lampante oil. But that’s just what’s happening.”
He said he makes it a point to meet as many producers as he can, and visit their mills. “The best way to know for sure if an oil is good is to see where it comes from, walk among the trees that made the olives, shake the hands that did the picking,” März said. “As far as I’m concerned, the only honest oil-makers are those who grow their own olives. By now it’s a war between growers like us and the oil traders, who just buy, mix, and sell other people’s oil—and profit from the inherently illegal condition of the olive oil industry.”
We tasted oils from various parts of Italy, then experimented by pouring them over the dishes that arrived one by one from Eva’s range. For all their variety, these oils had a few things in common. As März had said, each had the fresh, intensely green taste and aroma of recently harvested olives. And each was completely free of that flabby, cooked, meaty, faintly rancid taste of many supermarket oils. Ordinary extra virgin olive oils aren’t necessarily bad, but premium extra virgin olive oil is a superior product—a fact explicitly stated in EU regulations. In fact, “ordinary extra virgin olive oil” is a contradiction in terms, and “premium extra virgin olive oil” a tautology: the “extra” in “extra virgin” means it’s superior. As März said, “According to the letter of the law, a true extra virgin is a great oil, like a grand cru wine. It’s an oil that makes you get down on your knees and say, ‘Fuck!’”
At the end of the meal, after thick slices of Swiss walnut cake (“No tiramisù can touch this,” März said), with the grappa still simmering on our tongues, I asked again about his audacious taste test, and Carapelli’s lawsuit against him. “I’m happy that they’re suing me,” he replied. “Now I’ll finally have the chance to bring the corruption in this industry to the attention of the world.”
He was trying to put a bold face on his predicament—trying to play the cardsharp, the Texas Ranger. But in his voice, and in Eva’s expression as she paused over the range to listen, I sensed the weariness and anxiety of farmers who longed to end this long detour through courts, and return to the calm conviviality of their meals, and to the silence of their trees.
FROM CLASSICAL TIMES until the beginning of
the nineteenth century, Europeans (like people the world over) obtained their fats and oils from locally grown products. Small mills, presses, and workshops dotted the countryside, which in the north mainly processed animal fats, and in the south made olive oil.
In the early 1800s, first in England and soon after on the Continent, the factories of the Industrial Revolution developed vast new appetites for lipids. Steam-powered machines with precision, high-speed parts required more and better lubricants; textile mills consumed ever-growing quantities of fabric softeners; and a booming detergents industry called for a rapidly increasing supply of fatty acids. Traditional sources of animal fats and vegetable oils soon proved insufficient. English traders began importing a series of exotic foreign oils from their tropical colonies, most notably palm oil from Guinea and coconut oil from India. The French likewise imported peanut oil from their African colonies and linseed oil from the Levant to supply the thriving soap industry in Marseille. At first these oils were inedible, but over the next several decades food chemists invented vegetable oil refining and hydrogenation, which yielded cheap, thick, spreadable fats with long shelf lives: industrial cuisine for a new industrial society.
In 1866, Napoleon III announced a competition to create inexpensive, healthy, easily conserved foods for the army and the working classes. French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès won first prize with oleomargarine, an ersatz butter which he whipped up from rendered beef, water, and casein, a protein extracted from milk. In 1871, Mège-Mouriès sold the patent to Jurgens and Van den Bergh, two Dutch butter companies which soon specialized in margarine manufacturing. The companies found ways to replace beef and casein with cheaper vegetable oils, especially Guinean palm oil and American cottonseed oil, and before long opened factories in Belgium, Germany, and England. By 1895, European margarine production had already reached 300,000 tons, and by 1923, hydrogenated oils and solid fractions of liquid oils made up almost 90 percent of the fats consumed by Europeans. Jurgens subsequently merged with several other oil and fat concerns, including the prominent British soap manufacturer Lever Brothers, to form Unilever, a far-flung multinational which extracted endless streams of oils from its extensive tropical plantations, piped them through huge refineries, and funneled them into people’s mouths through worldwide trading channels.
As the distance between producer and consumer grew, extended by an ever-longer chain of anonymous middlemen, food fraud became easier to commit. In England, where the traditions of peasant foraging and cooking were already being weakened by the enclosure movement, the Industrial Revolution brought an age of rampant food adulteration: bread tainted with alum and copper sulfate, beer “corrected” with narcotic picrotoxins, children’s sweets colored with lead and mercury, and “demon grocers” who purveyed a range of revolting and sometimes deadly dry goods. In 1848, chemist John Mitchell observed that England was “about the only nation that has no laws, or no effective laws, for the protection of the public against the adulteration of food.” Much of this was due to the British government’s emphasis on free trade, and a faith that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” would sort things out. The government’s view, according to food historian Bee Wilson, was simple: “What happened between a man and his baker was no business of the state; free trade was best.” As it happens, laissez-faire had shielded British swindlers long before the Industrial Revolution. Writing in 1726, Jonathan Swift had already consumed his fair share of adulterated bread and beer, and clearly thought little of free market economics. In Gulliver’s Travels, his Lilliputians
look upon Fraud as a greater Crime than Theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with Death: For they allege, that Care and Vigilance, with a very common Understanding, may preserve a Man’s Good from Thieves; but Honesty hath no Fence against superior Cunning: And since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual Intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon Credit; where Fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no Law to punish it, the honest Dealer is always undone, and the Knave gets the Advantage.
Fighting fraud in a world of long-distance trade was possible, as the ancient Romans proved at Monte Testaccio, and as the French government did in the mid-nineteenth century with a battery of stiff new laws against food counterfeiting. Yet without such concerted effort, most markets seem to take care of themselves, not their consumers. A slender but significant difference exists between caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware,” and floreat mercator, “let the seller get rich.”
Aside from outright fraud, however, the industrialization of the world food supply in the nineteenth century also marked the birth of what might be called legal fraud. Beginning with margarine and shortening and continuing in many thousands of other mass-produced foodstuffs, new processing techniques made it possible to assemble food in factories from an increasingly homogenized and anonymous range of materials. Oil refining and hydrogenation meant that “butter” could be created from rendered beef fat or palm oil, “lard” made from cottonseed oil, and “olive oil” concocted from peanut or poppyseed oil—or from whatever other commodity had the lowest price at that moment.
IN APRIL 2006, I visited the Bertolli refinery and bottling plant at Inveruno, in the industrial hinterland of Milan, where the Alps form a snowy curtain along the northern horizon. An ancient olive tree stood at the entrance to the plant, its leaves thin and browning, a few mummified olives clinging, unpicked, to its branches. Like that sad second-century Roman senator posted to the Danube, this tree was clearly out of its element in the cold northlands, where olives have never thrived. It and a handful of other olive trees had been dug up in their native Puglia and replanted here eight years earlier, to decorate the huge new facility, which produces 8 percent of the world’s extra virgin olive oil. Despite this impressive market share, however, these may be the only olive trees that the Bertolli company, bought out by Unilever in 1994, has ever owned. Even back in the 1870s, the Bertolli family that founded the firm were bankers, not farmers or millers, and since then the company has always dealt in someone else’s oil. Now tanker trucks arrive at the facility all year long, carrying oil which Bertolli buyers source throughout the Mediterranean. Only about 20 percent of it is Italian; the bulk comes from Spain, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. Marco De Ceglie, the personable oil executive who showed me around the facility, insisted that Bertolli doesn’t rely on its Italian image to sell oil. “The country of origin means absolutely nothing to us,” he said. “We’ve always maintained that the important thing isn’t the ‘100% Italian’ [label], but the Italian know-how in producing and blending oil—that’s the real value-added.” What’s more, he rejected the criticism of supermarket oils by self-styled oil experts, who presume to educate consumers about what constitutes good olive oil, as paternalistic, even dictatorial. “Someone better think twice before they try to come into my home and ‘educate’ me, tell me what I should and shouldn’t like,” De Ceglie said. “We have to feed the whole population, not just please the rich and forget about all the rest. We’re not like Marie Antoinette—‘If the peasants don’t have bread, let them eat cake.’ And after all, those guys lost their heads!”
De Ceglie’s talk of egalitarianism and fair play doesn’t always square with Bertolli’s marketing tactics, however. The company’s television advertisements in Italy have, in fact, used Tuscan accents and settings to suggest the Tuscanness of its oil, and the Bertolli website, emblazoned with “Lucca” and “Passione Italiana,” has featured a naïve pastel drawing of a four-generation family feasting on mozzarella, salami, and Chianti in a straw-covered bottle, against a backdrop of olive groves and cypress-clad hills that looks suspiciously like Tuscany. In Italy, other Bertolli ads have, in fact, presumed to dictate to consumers what constitutes a good olive oil—and have in the process misinformed them about the definition of extra virginity.
In the US, until 2001, Bertolli bottles were marked “Imported from Italy” and “Made in Italy,” and the company used slogans such as �
�Born in the Tuscany Mountains” and “Like the Da Vinci [painting of the Madonna and Saint Anne], Bertolli olive oil is an authentic Italian Masterpiece.” In 1998, however, Marvin L. Frank of the New York law firm Murray, Frank & Sailer brought a class-action suit against the company, charging that Bertolli oil was made from Spanish oil shipped to Italy for bottling, and that the company had used deceptive advertising because consumers were willing to pay more for Italian oil. (Frank says he settled the case in 2001, when Bertolli agreed to tone down its claims in its advertisements and labels.) A commercial that ran several years ago on Italian television shows two attractive oil-tasters, a man and a woman, sipping Bertolli oil in regulation tulip glasses. “It’s what we wanted, no?” the man says. “Gentle on the palate.” The woman agrees: “It’s not peppery in the throat, it isn’t heavy—it’s what we were looking for!” In reality, “gentleness” or mildness is a frequent attribute of low-quality oil, and pepperiness is one of the three official positive attributes, together with bitterness and fruitiness, identified in the legal definition of extra virginity. Other big producers continue to rely on similar marketing sleight-of-hand: in a recent television advertisement by Carapelli, an actor dressed in lush Renaissance silks and brocades to resemble Lorenzo de’ Medici praised the taste of Carapelli oils in a thick Florentine brogue. This bait-and-switch fuels revenues: customer surveys suggest that most Italians buy oil they believe is made from Italian olives, and prefer it to oil from other countries. The same preference undoubtedly exists in many other countries.
At Inveruno, the various oils Bertolli buys were stored in towering silos, which with their observation catwalks and gantries of pipes resembled ballistic missiles, and held €10 million in oil—liquid assets that had drawn unwanted attention in the past. Several years earlier, De Ceglie told me, the plant was robbed by sophisticated oil thieves, who jammed the surveillance cameras to prevent detection and then siphoned off several million euros in oil into tanker trucks. After this theft, Unilever installed an alarm system which senses motion and changes in pressure and temperature throughout the facility, and automatically dispatches text messages to alert the personnel. “Oil is cash,” said De Ceglie with a shrug. “You take it and you sell it instantly.”