OLIVES AND LIVES
By Tom Mueller
From Extra Virginity
Living in Liguria in an ancient stone farmhouse surrounded by olive groves, writer Tom Mueller found ready inspiration for this groundbreaking book about the international olive oil trade—its frauds, its failures, and the artisanal producers striving to restore honor to the label “extra virgin.”
For the De Carlo family olives mean home, not only because their family tree has intertwined with their groves and with oil-making for the last four centuries, but literally as well; their house is perched atop their mill like the keep of a castle. The impression of defensiveness at casa De Carlo is accentuated by the imposing security wall which rings the property, as well as the surveillance cameras which film everyone who approaches the main gate and project them on screens inside the house. Local producers are periodically held up by armed oil bandits, who drive tanker trucks with high-pressure pumps to siphon oil out of storage silos. “After a certain hour we don’t open the gates,” Saverio said as we returned to the house for lunch, after touring the De Carlo groves. Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister’s lap as they ate pickled cima di Mola olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals. (Olive pits are an excellent fuel, and oil-makers often sell their olive pomace—the solid residue from oil extraction, consisting mostly of crushed pits—to electric companies and other industries, to be burned in furnaces.)
Grazia knelt on the hearth beside them, and set several pounds of suckling lamb on a grill over the coals to cook. While the meat sizzled and popped and we watched the little eruptions of flame from each drip of fat, she told a true story of poisoning, blindness, and death, and said she half wished it would happen again.
In March 1986, she said, hospitals in northwest Italy began to admit dozens of people suffering from acute nausea, lack of coordination, fainting spells, and blurred vision. Twenty-six died, and twenty more went blind. Investigators eventually discovered that each victim had recently drunk a local white wine; several producers, they found, had been raising the alcohol levels of their wines by cutting them with methanol, a highly toxic substance also called wood alcohol. The scandal, and the resulting government crackdown, devastated the Italian wine industry. Consumption plummeted, and hundreds of producers, most of them honest, went bankrupt. Ultimately, however, the crisis radically improved Italian wine-making and forced a generalized shift from quantity to quality.
“Before the methanol scandal, people around here didn’t make wine like this,” Grazia said, pouring glasses of Rivera Il Falcone 2004, a garnet-red wine made from a local grape varietal, nero di Troia, by a producer at Castel del Monte, a nearby medieval castle. “And even if they had, nobody would have bought it. Most people just bought their wine in big jugs without labels. You’d see them on tables in restaurants, where they’d been sitting open for days. Most people wouldn’t dream of buying a bottle of wine with a label on it.”
After the methanol crisis, consumers grew more particular, and the producers who survived the market consolidation learned to use techniques and technology pioneers by French enologists. “After the scandal, producers started creating brand names they were proud of and wanted to defend. Only after methanol did people start thinking about what they were buying and drinking, and become willing to pay for the good stuff. And only after methanol did the government get really serious about checking quality, and making sure that the bottle contained just what the label said.” During the 1990s, dozens of premier Italian wines emerged, and wine became a major export product (wine recently topped $1 billion in annual sales in Italy).
Grazia brought the wine to her lips, then stopped and put it down without tasting it. “In olive oil, we’re where the wine-makers were before methanol,” she said. “We’re stuck in the dark ages.” She shook her head disconsolately. “It would be awful to see my children’s livelihood damaged, even destroyed. And I’d certainly never want to see anyone hurt. But sometimes I wish there could be a methanol scandal in olive oil, which would obliterate this corrupt industry completely, and rebuild it in a healthy way. It’s been Babylon around here for far too long.”
Our lunch began with a succession of seasonal vegetables, mostly from the De Carlos’ own garden: lampascioni, a small wild hyacinth bulb marinated in oil and vinegar; meaty, densely flavored cherry tomatoes; puntarelle, the tender tips of a local chicory; and flat little artichokes as big around as a pound coin or a quarter, lightly fried. “Pugliesi eat an incredible amount of vegetables—we’re like goats,” said Francesco, a rangy twenty-four-year-old with a crew cut and large, dark, serious eyes that watch you unblinkingly, though their intensity is softened by a faint, unsarcastic smile that never leaves his lips. He holds a degree in food quality and a diploma in olive oil tasting from the University of Naples and recently launched a De Carlo line of vegetables in extra virgin olive oil: mushrooms, artichokes, peppers, and other produce grown on their lands, as well as green table olives of the picholine and cima di Mola cultivars. “I introduced them to broaden our product offering so that our facilities would remain active throughout the year,” he explained. “But given the sorry state of oil prices nowadays, they’re a much higher-margin business and help us stay profitable.” His modern financial jargon was so different from his father’s homespun way of talking about the oil business that I instinctively asked if he and Saverio worked well together.
Francesco didn’t miss a beat. “No. We argue every day,” he said. “Every single day!” And when the laughter, a shade nervous, subsided, he added, with a quick, testing look at Saverio: “Disagreeing, sharing different opinions, deciding together the best way forward—that’s the best way to collaborate, no?”
For all his university training, Francesco clearly shares his father’s visceral enthusiasm for olive oil. His earliest memories also concern the family mill—such as the time, as a three-year-old, when he fell asleep in a little nest between sacks of olives, and slept through the increasingly despairing cries of his family as they searched for him amid the whirring blades and grinding wheels.
“If you’d come a couple of weeks earlier, or later, you’d be eating a completely different meal,” Francesco said, looping a green ribbon of Arcamone oil over a big bowl of a half-dozen different wild-looking greens, most of which I’d never seen before, and whose names he knew only in the local dialect, not in Italian: cuolacidd, spunzál, sevón, cicuredd. “We pugliesi are demanding about these things,” he continued as he stirred the glistening leaves. “We try to eat only vegetables and fruits that are in season. Many Italians are the same. They prefer fresh things from local gardens to the brown, tired-looking produce in supermarkets, even when local crops cost more. So why don’t they buy their oil the same way? Olives are a seasonal fruit, and olive oil is a fresh-pressed fruit juice—it’s best shortly after it’s made, and goes downhill from there. Why on earth do people buy expensive vegetables like these, and dress them with the cheapest oil they can find?”
De Carlo oil flowed for the rest of the meal, gushing over the burrata, a rich curdy cousin of mozzarella, and pooling in the little cups of the orecchiette pasta with boragine, a wild herb. At first I thought the De Carlos were showing off for me, but I soon saw that they used olive oil this way every day, choosing from the four different oils on the table the one that best fit each dish they were dressing. Saverio sloshed so much Tenuta Torre di Mossa, the family’s pepperiest oil, over his grilled lamb that the others giggled and pointed. He bobbed his head and smiled happily, the first smile I’d seen from him. “I’ve spent my whole life making oil, but I can never eat enough of it. What other job gives you this?”
He handed me the oil, and I poured some over my lamb. As if it had catalyzed subtle chemical reactions in the meat, I tasted dense new flavors which I hadn’t noticed in my previous, unoiled bites: the rosemary and santoregia Grazia had used to season it, the brown
ed fat, the light charring from the olive-wood grill—each flavor had a new depth and intensity. The meat even felt different, more supple and juicy. This oil wasn’t just a condiment, but had entered into the dish.
When I observed this, Francesco snorted. “Try telling that to a chef!” He explained that he’d recently given an oil-tasting course in Naples to twenty head chefs of prominent restaurants, most of whom had shown the most abject ignorance about olive oil. “Each of these guys ran a top-flight restaurant, right? Some had Michelin stars. They had highly developed palates for wine and for foods of all kinds. But every last one of them was using a refined olive oil or a cut-rate extra virgin in their kitchens, and even on their tables. They’d been using bad oils so long that they didn’t even know what a good oil tasted like.”
Grazia, who had been silent for some time, spoke with sudden force. “Then we’ve got to teach them. The road we’ve got to follow is la cultura; educating people about good oil is the only way out of this crisis. Because once someone tries a real extra virgin—an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds—they’ll never go back to the fake kind. It’s distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you’ve ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.”
She stood and went into the kitchen to get dessert, leaving a sudden silence in the room. Everyone seemed to be thinking about what she’d said, and what she’d omitted: that if the economics of oil-making don’t change soon, no one will be left to make real extra virgin oil. Not even the De Carlos.
THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET
By Laura R. Zandstra
From Memoir Journal
Before she became a creative nonfiction writer and oral historian, teenaged Laura Zandstra helped her Indiana farming family sell produce at a weekly farmer’s market in Chicago. With impressionistic strokes, she evokes the market day experience as seen from behind the scales and cash register.
Chicago at four a.m. smells like two hundred years of dirt and one hundred years of oil and gasoline spilled on pavement and then congealed in the dew before daylight. About that time on Saturday mornings, our 1979 Mercedes truck pulled into the high school parking lot at 29th and King Drive, thirty miles from our Indiana fields, and eight of us would tumble out into the darkness, throw open the rear roll-up door, and set to work unloading our wares.
The cabbages were in fifty pound boxes that, try as I might, I could not heave off the back of the truck by myself. The beans were in square wooden crates, the green onions in fancy waxed cartons with pictures on them. We bought the green onions from our neighbors, the DeJong brothers. They sold us radishes, too, because we didn’t quite have the space or the dirt or the patience to grow them ourselves, as prone to pests and in need of constant looking after as radishes are. The tomatoes, however, were ours, and kept in cardboard that cushioned their soft red flesh. The spinach was ours, too, packed into bushel baskets with lids held in place by wooden slats secured under metal handles.
The beets, the carrots, the turnips, the corn: load by load, we paced the lot from the rear of the truck to unmarked spots on the pavement, arranging these boxes and bushels on the blacktop where their contents would be displayed once the sun was up and the community emerged. While we worked, a handful of people would stray past, illuminated beneath the streetlights the last ones to sleep and the first ones to wake. They’d wish us good morning, or stop to tilt their heads and watch our efforts.
Brother Al was one of this handful. He always appeared long before darkness had melted from the sky, with hair that looked like an old Brillo pad and gray coveralls that smelled like sweat and dust.
“You got any butta’ beans, Baby?” he’d ask me.
I’d shrug. “I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know yet?” he’d tease with a grin and a gentle elbow jab.
“It’s too early,” I’d tell him with a scowl.
“Too early for what? How old a’ you?”
“Eleven.”
“You just a baby.”
“The truck isn’t all the way unloaded yet,” I’d say, mad. “So it’s too early for me to know if there are any lima beans today.” Then defiantly under my breath: “I’m not a baby.”
Our vegetable stand was the most primitive at the South Side farmer’s market. My father and his brother had purchased canopies from a man with a fancy welder who lived a few towns over. The man had cut one-inch metal pipe into long pieces that served as beams and short pieces that served as rafters. These made sturdy rectangular frames once fitted into welded steel corners that looked like hollow-limbed spiders. We’d bungee gray tarps over two such frames and then erect them, three medium-length pipe legs on each long side of a rectangle.
Beneath the tarps we balanced old doors on tall, conical bushel baskets that arrived from southern states packed tight with pole beans and purple hull peas. The doors had come from deep in the junk stocks of our farm where they’d congregated for years, gathered two and three at a time from dumps and construction sites and neighbors who were remodeling. There is room on a farm for all manner of almost-garbage—car carcasses and plywood scraps and retired traffic signs—and always the sense that one day, hoarded odds and ends will fall precisely into place in the puzzling mill of farm projects.
The doors and baskets had found just such fruition, and once they were lined up in long skinny rows, we piled them with produce picked from our fields in the days before. Yellow squash next to zucchini, leaf lettuce next to green peppers, pickles next to tall stalks of dill. The melons arrived on their own flatbed truck and were too heavy to arrange on our rickety doors, so we’d line up from truck to table front, tossing Millionaires and Sangrias, Saticoys, muskmelons, and honeydew one man to the next, arranging them on the pavement until handsome foothills of fruit girded the walkway beneath our gray tarps.
To the left and around the corner from us in the line-up of vendors was Lyon’s Orchards, whose apple cider is still the best I’ve ever had. Tom Lyon—a dashing football player of a farmer’s son with wavy black hair slicked back from his forehead—enjoyed harassing me as much as Brother Al did. He’d throw rotten fruit at me from time to time just to watch me get mad, which I always did in spite of myself.
Don the flower guy was to our right. His sandy blonde hair stuck out in wings beneath his green seed company cap and hung in a thick mustache under his nose. He chain-smoked from open to close, a cigarette dangling between his lips while he handed out change or put bouquet stems in plastic bags so as not to drip mud and water onto paying customers. He gave me leftover bunches of baby’s breath at the end of the day.
“Here comes trouble,” he’d always say when he saw me approaching.
At the far end of the parking lot, across a wide expanse of gravel and cracked pavement, were two vegetable growers—our competition. They tried to outsell us by offering cheap produce bought in bulk from California, or so the farmer rumor went. I squinted my eyes in their general direction whenever I had a moment to spare and assumed that they squinted back.
It was my job to scout out the nature of these competitors to make sure we were on level playing fields. After setup, I’d nose around their fancy, store bought display tables and bright blue tents, memorizing the price per pound of everything I could, and then present the information, along with note of any dubious products, like red peppers in June, to Uncle Butch, my boss. He’d sigh and heave a bit, then say, “Good work, Laura. We couldn’t do this without you,” and send me off to sell melons.
Melon prices were always set on dollars and quarters, so one could conduct sales and dig change from the green money-apron pockets without the need for plastic bags or proper scales or speed in simple math.
“Muskmelons are
two for a dollar,” I’d tell those who stopped to sniff at the alligator skin of the fruit.
“Mush melons?” people would snarl in disgust.
“No, muskmelons. They’re just like cantaloupe.”
“Got any half-price melons?”
“Not yet, Brother Al. Come back later and I’ll have some set aside for you.”
“Come back later?” he’d chuckle. “You just a baby, but I’ll see if I can’t come back after lunch, get me some melons and butta’ beans. What about okra? You got any okra today?”
“I think I saw some halfway down the table,” I’d say and point timidly, knowing that if I was wrong, further harassment would ensue.
Brother Al would snort with a smile and pat my shoulder before ambling off into the crowds.
By the time I turned twelve, I had graduated from melons up to the greens table. I was shocked to learn of its existence. Unbeknownst to me, somewhere hidden deep in its flat acres, our farm produced endless bushel baskets of turnip greens, curly mustard greens, slick mustard greens, collards, and kale. Unlike the rest of the vegetables at our stand, these items had never made an appearance at our dinner table. I’d never even heard of them, and yet they were significant enough to require a sizable display and separate staffing. Fortunately, my lack of knowledge mattered little. The greens went like hot-cakes no matter who was selling them.
“Now,” my uncle instructed, joining me briefly on my first day behind the greens table where two bushels of each variety were pushed up against each other in haphazard showcase, “when one basket is almost empty, you dump the last few handfuls into the other bushel of the same kind and then put a new one up on the table. Got it? I’ll come and check on you in a while.”
Best Food Writing 2012 Page 9