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Losing My Urbinity: First Impressions of Country Livin’
For those of you who haven’t been religiously hanging on my every tweet (shame on you), I should start by mentioning that my wife and I recently took the plunge. No we didn’t sell all our earthly belongings and go a-wandering in India. We merely moved from the city to the hinterland. We rusticated ourselves. In short, we are now a couple of bumpkins, catching our eggs as they fall from the chicken and raising our eyebrows disparagingly at the goings on of those dens of iniquity called cities.
On the off chance that you might want to tear yourself away from the gogglebox, the Playstation 3, or the interweb long enough to read about our experience, I’ve set down a few highlights for you.
The Luscious Silence
Living in the city, I had no idea what silence is. Yeah, sure, I’d been on vacation, hiked into the mountains, sipped the pure air, listened to the faint rustle of the wind in the trees. But the moment I got back to the city all that instantly faded from memory. All I really had was the memory of a memory of true quiet.
When we first arrived in our new home, the silence in the country was shocking—as though for twenty years someone had been standing behind me blowing a kazoo in my ear and then suddenly stopped. Maybe the best way to describe the silence is to say that it feels not like the absence of noise, but like the presence of something—something peaceful and good.
Economies of Space
The silence is mostly a consequence of a vastly different human-being to square-footage ratio. Ask yourself what causes all this magnificent silence and the answer comes back, space.
Turns out having space is easier on the pocketbook too. You can have a big garden for one thing. You can keep chickens, ducks, goats, and so on. Even better: you can make stuff. I now have room for work benches and belt sanders and such things. I’m about to turn a piece of discarded cedar into a crude table. It is exactly, precisely in every way not like taking a trip to Ikea. You can even make rooms. Need an extra bedroom or a workshop? There’s a nice spot right there. Start hammering.
People: Fewer, Nicer
Like most people who have had to deal with Vancouver traffic, I had a spring-loaded middle finger. On any given drive across town, the odds were pretty good that someone was going to behave like an asshole. We Vancouverites may not have invented road rage, but we’ve made decent strides in the development of it. Plenty of jerks to deal with off the road as well, whether it’s the gang of drinkers smashing a bottle outside your bedroom in the middle of the night, the leathery dude drowning out your music with his Harley, or the young woman chain-smoking just upwind of your apartment on a breezy day.
Of course the city is filled with a plenty of good folks too. The problem is, so many people are smushed together in so tight a space, you get daily exposure to the full range. This arrangement is infinitely worsened by the fact that everybody is mobile. The people you see are mostly strangers, and the ones that aren’t are likely to be moving somewhere else within a couple of years. To go along with all of our disposable products, the city has given us disposable relationships.
Moving to the country involves two important changes: first, you see a lot less of your fellow human beings on any given day. Maybe that makes some people anti-social, but not me. In the city solitude is precious and rare. Here I get my fill, and that has already made me more smiley and more inclined to want to have nice slow chats with friends and neighbors. Second, many of the people you meet, you’re going to continue to meet for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. That adds a very un-urban dimension of responsibility and trust. You find you just don’t need as much of that edgy, dog-eat-dog attitude anymore.
The Food
If you live in the big city (or big shitty, as we salt-of-the-earth, hayseed, peasant folk like to say), happily for you, farmers’ markets have closed the gap between town and country foodwise. The excellent, farm-fresh comestibles I was scoring at the f.m. in Vancouver were almost as good as the stuff I find on the island.
Let me explain the “almost.” People have been farming on Salt Spring for a long time, well over a hundred years. The island’s agriculture land is well-stocked with ancient and non-commercial species of fruit tree. The smaller, more diverse farms on the island also allow for a much greater range of veggies and livestock than you find in the urban food supply chains. For me it’s definitely added-value to have, for example, easy access to fresh-picked apples I’ve never tasted before. Galas aren’t bad if you get ‘em straight out of the cooler, but you should try a Gravenstein. Yum.
Another advantage is that out here you can easily form an even more direct relationship with farmers than you can at the farmers markets. The farms are only a short ways down the road. Last week I spent a morning at an island farm seeding a field and picking berries. It was easy to do and it felt pretty good.
The Virtues of Urban Life
Having said all these nice things about my first encounter with rural life, I must add the usual caveat. It’s been pointed out by various eco-people that urban living is a necessary part of the modern world. You couldn’t spread the seven billion human beings alive right now smoothly over the countryside like butter on toast without smothering it. Like it or not, there are energy efficiencies to be achieved by packing ourselves tightly cheek by jowl into giant, insect-like colonies. So, if you live in a city, you can truthfully claim that you are doing your bit for Mother Earth and world peace right where you are. You might even like it.
If, however, you are tempted to go back to the land, the usual advice is: don’t get too hung up on the practicalities of it. There’s no question that cities are where all the action is when it comes to career advancement. A move to the country is a statement about what matters to you. If you’re sincere in your desire, I like to think things have a way of working out. My wife and I made the choice not because we had a million dollars to smooth the path, but because we wanted to do it, and we wanted to see if it could be done.
We’re about to find out.
The Hero of 40 Years Ago
Norman Borlaug
If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:
”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
”They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Sound familiar? Sure. This is the typical refrain you hear from the folks at Monsanto, etcetera, when they are wiffle-batting criticisms of biotech back at “environmentalists.”
So an obit of a man who died at the age of 95 has very modern political relevance in the food world. And, hey, who wouldn’t want a Nobel Peace Prize winner backing up his side of the argument? But it would be a mistake for those advocating sustainable agriculture to react defensively to references to elitists, or to deny Prof Borlaug his due.
Things have changed in the decades since Prof Borlaug struggled to save millions from starvation as the world population exploded. His Nobel Prize, it’s worth remembering, was awarded in 1970. Population growth is still an issue, but now so too is climate change. A modern Borlaug, striving to feed the world’s poor in the coming century, certainly could not and would not dismiss the “environmental lobby” as elitist.
Sustainable agriculture is modern, hi-tech agriculture, even (and perhaps especially) when it is critical of chemical inputs and the use of genetic engineering for profit rather than for people. Almost all organic farmers these days, for example, are innovators, entrepreneurs and developers—nothing like the caricature of a back-to-the-land, hippie Luddite. It is safe for progressives to acknowledge Borlaug’s legacy while continuing to reflect on the defects of the “Green Revolution” and without worrying too much about the way his words and experience may be taken out of context by some people to push product.
On the Not-So-Weird Absence of Food Guides in Cyberspace (with Research Tips!)
You’d think that the web, which is so full of everything else, would also be full of handy, sustainable food guides of all shapes, colors and configurations. It isn’t. You can’t just plug the brand name of your frozen pizza into a search field somewhere and get a full readout of the provenance of your meal.
Hmm…why is that? The obvious explanation is that there are just too darned many products out there. Significant variations from region to region make things worse, and if you ever did manage to catalog everything, you’d have to start all over again because so much would have changed in the meantime. A web guide would need a staff of twenty full-timers to stay on top of it all. The best we can hope for, I believe, is the rise of some sort of crowd-sourced food wiki. There’s nothing out there yet I’m aware of that isn’t in a uselessly prototypical form. In the meantime, here are some suggestions for eaters who want to a do their own research.
• The Eat Well Guide is very easy to use and tries to point you towards local, sustainable, organic food resources in your area. I say “tries” because the search results for my area (Vancouver) were somewhat limited. Perhaps you’ll do better if you’re near a major American city. Local Harvest is a similar site that connects you with organic farms and farmers’ markets (again, mostly in the U.S.).
• Britain’s Ethical Consumer does actually have a food buyer’s guide with ratings for individual products, but naturally it isn’t all that helpful to us Norte Americanos.
• If you want to get your food politics consciousness-raising on, here are ten blogs worth watching. They provide the kind of background information that makes it much easier to make wise food choices.
• Many articles on food quote “non-profit” organizations and refer to studies to back up their claims, but not all non-profits and studies are created equal. To find out whether you’re dealing with a legitimate source or an industry front group, you need look no further than Sourcewatch.org.
• Phil Howard has created some handy charts, detailing corporate acquisitions of little mom-and-pop organic food companies. Not saying you should stop buying a particular brand just because it’s been acquired, but it’s good to know what’s going on in the market.
• Lastly, if you are a twitterer you will find many fine slow-food, real-food tweeps by searching #ProFood and #Slowfood and similar hashtags. Take advantage of the hivemind. Once you refine your ‘followed’ list, Twitter becomes a powerful information aggregator.
If all else fails, you can never go far wrong by just plugging the product or brand in question into Google and seeing what happens. And if even that fails, why not try avoiding processed mystery foods altogether? Rediscover the joy of cooking. Get to know your fruit and veg on a whole new level and frequent farmers markets where you can shake hands with the people who grew your food. It’s worth the trouble. Taking the time to learn more about your food and to cook more from scratch will make you healthier and happier. Guaranteed.
Update: This just popped up on Mashable. Worth checking out: 10 New Sites For Socially Responsible Shopping.
Whole Foods Reminds Everyone That Branding Is Often Fake
If you’ve been watching the food news this week, then you know all about the Wall Street Journal op-ed of Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, and the boycott that resulted from it.
Has Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, been demonized by the left? (Bonus question: has this picture been Photoshopped?)
Lots of copy has been spilled over this, and it falls neatly along partisan lines. The Democratically inclined are horrified by what seems like a rather crackpot, libertarian contribution to the health care debate, while Republicans are disgusted that the lefties appear to be attacking one of their own for merely exercising his freedom of speech.
Titillating stuff. The food beat is usually not so nipple-tingling.
Let’s take a step back and have another look at the Mackey affair in the light of branding, the business world’s favorite art, science, and religion. Branding is, after all, the final platform of marketing wisdom to which you ascend after you’ve…well, you know, slain all the evil marketing wizards and mastered marketing karate from the strange but powerful old Okinawan man who speaks in riddles.
The marketing department at Whole Foods has spent millions building the Whole Foods brand, and that brand is the company’s public persona, the totality of how you perceive Whole Foods. Marketing people sometimes ask questions like, if Whole Foods were a person, what kind of person would it be? They’ve done a pretty good job of convincing you that Whole Foods is a friendly, middle-aged hippie, who cares a lot about Mother Earth, goes to yoga classes, buys only organic, and whose forward-looking, right-thinking attitude has also made him prosperous enough to be able to afford his own high-priced, gluten-free, dolphin-friendly goodies.
Enter Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, who, like a nincompoop, busts out the keyboard and raps to the world: branding is all 100% fake! It’s total bullshit. Hey, you there! Yes, you. You know, you’d really have to be an idiot to believe all that copy our marketing people spit out about Whole Foods and what it stands for.
Forget about the health care debate for a second and consider the fact that by publicly espousing a right-wing political position (extremely right-wing outside of the U.S.A.), John Mackey is laying bare a truth that makes people deeply uncomfortable. The truth is that our culture, values and beliefs are mixed up with brands, and those brands are artificial constructions whose purpose is to sell stuff. The customers of Whole Foods really, really didn’t want to know that Whole Foods is actually John Mackey and not that friendly, compassionate hippie guy. This flap was over health care, but any political issue would have served just as well.
The CEO of Whole Foods, in effect, just mounted a highly successful attack on his own company’s marketing position.
The Economist weighed in pragmatically with the suggestion that, politics aside, John Mackey owes it to the shareholders to keep his mouth shut. The less customers know about a CEO’s personal views the better. The Economist is right. Mackey should have just kept his lips zipped. But the cynics are also probably right. It would be surprising if the boycott had any significant effect on Whole Foods’ bottom line.
Everybody in this story is free. John Mackey is free to say whatever he wants. Whole Foods customers are free to boycott Whole Foods. What will be the end effect on the company and the health care debate? Sadly, the outcome is usually determined to the large number of people who aren’t paying any attention to any of it.
So Long and Thanks For All the Fish
Lots more in the papers today on what the Globe calls “the near total collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run.”
Quick background for non-British Columbians: We BCers, though no longer hewers of wood and wrestlers of bears, still love the outdoors for the most part, and the noble salmon—especially the delicious sockeye—are a keystone in the natural archway of our wilderness. (We have salmon art, for God’s sake. Do you have fish art where you live? Probably not.) There used to be countless millions of salmon swimming up the Fraser River alone in spawning season. It’s a big river, and you could practically walk across their backs to the other shore there were so many. The bigness of the river also means that the tributaries of the Fraser extend deep into the hinterland, formerly providing plenty of fishy food not only to wildlife on the coast, but in the interior as well. It was an almost Edenic food supply: free, abundant, fairly easy to collect, and self-renewing. Salmon, or “river chicken,” as it is sometimes lovingly called by local yokels, isn’t just something we toss on the barbecue; it’s part of our culture and heritage.
So now, after decades of declining numbers, comes the news that this government-managed fishery has catastrophically collapsed. 1.7 million sockeye will return this year instead of the predicted 10.6 to 13 million. And no one knows why. There are theories, but, you know, it’s a big ocean. It isn’t easy to count and follow fish.
Environmentalists, government bureaucrats, and various interested groups such as salmon farmers and fishermen, have been squabbling over conservation/exploitation issues for years. The usual response given by opponents of the environmentalists has been that their concerns are “alarmist.” It’s a familiar, paternalistic refrain: serious people, they seem to be saving, who have to deal with serious, practical issues, needn’t take these environmentalists seriously.
Well, now the alarm bells are ringing about as loudly as they possibly could be. It’s a regular Seussian band of bells, clangers, clappers and cymbals—enough to wake the dead, or the merely bureaucratic. The question is, what will change, if anything, now that opponents of a truly conservative conservation strategy no longer have the “alarmist” card to play?
Why Did We Start Eating Junk?
I like to think that the slow food/good food/real food movement (or whatever you want to call it) partly owes its success to the weird diet, the fallout-shelter “food” many of us grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. It all had one thing in common: left to its own devices, it would take months to decompose.
This diet, at least as I remember it in my household, consisted of canned everything, and instant everything. The first time I tasted frozen peas in early adulthood I remember thinking they didn’t taste very good. I had only ever known the pea in its dark, mushy, semi-fermented, straight-from-the-can incarnation. Other household standbys beside canned veggies included Shake’n'Bake chicken, Kraft Dinner, hot dogs on white Wonder Bread buns, and something we called rice and meat sauce.
"Wonder Bread Helps Catch Boys!" 1968
Here’s the recipe for rice and meat sauce: Fry up some ground beef, mix in some spaghetti sauce from a can or jar, dump this on top of a bed of white Minute Rice, and serve. It was my brother’s favorite dish.
Why were we eating this way? Had the evil geniuses in food industry marketing departments talked us into it?
Monty Python did a spoof on marketing back in the ’70s, in which a salesman finds himself with a big box full of short bits of string, and must come up with clever ways to position them. “Simpson’s Individual Stringettes!” he cries. “A million household uses!” This soon gets upgraded to, “pre-sliced, rustproof, easy-to-handle, low-calorie Simpson’s Individual Emperor Stringettes, free from artificial coloring, as used in hospitals!” Marketing is like that. Sometimes the producers are trying to foist something on you. On the other hand, sometimes they’re just eagerly attempting to stay abreast of a burgeoning, consumer-driven demand.
The food movement, as represented by Michael Pollan, often speaks of the food industry as an entity that has sold us on highly profitable processed goods. No doubt there’s plenty of truth in that. But I can clearly remember the pre-modern grocery store. I remember that it had plenty of raw materials on offer, as well as legions of grannies who still knew how to keep the butcher and the produce department manager honest. My family bought the cheap, canned, boxed, processed goods mainly because they required extremely little preparation. And why was that important? Well, for the obvious reason that both my parents had to work.
So we demanded those cheap, convenient processed foods. It was all we were eating. The more processed foods the food industry came up with, the greater the variety at the dinner table. And yes, our family also swallowed all that debunked nutritionist propaganda about fat being the great killer. We believed that so long as we were popping multivitamins and so long as we weren’t eating eggs fried in bacon grease for breakfast every morning, the processed food would take care of our nutritional needs just fine.
It’s certainly convenient to refer to the “food industry” as though there has been one guy in a suit running the whole show for the past forty years, pushing the highly processed food on an unsuspecting public. But when I reflect on food culture and what’s wrong with it, I can’t help thinking of my upbringing, and wondering if maybe the foodies have glossed over first causes.
Consider this: My parents generation was the first in memory that didn’t stand a chance of prospering without two incomes. Almost at the same historical moment that having a career became an option for all women, it became necessary for both parents to work in order to get by. And the food has been mostly crap ever since. If there are dark forces at work here, it has to do with more than just the food industry. Somewhere along the line families saw their workload doubled—without a corresponding increase in wealth and happiness. Perhaps that’s a better explanation for the modern diet.
Four Fun and Clever Ways to Boost Your Anti-GMO Mojo
So you’re not a fan of genetically engineered food. What can you do about it besides buying organic? Well, recently I bloggified the results of several weeks worth of research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the course of doing all that research I got a pretty good sense of what would most annoy GMO-peddling biotech corporations like Monsanto. Here, without further ado, are four ways you can boost your anti-GMO mojo.
- Push for government labeling of GMOs. Labeling is a scary prospect for biotech companies. Genetically engineered foods are extremely prevalent and becoming more so. What if a warning label reading, “contains genetically modified foods,” suddenly popped up on the packaging? Demand for GMOs would instantly drop, costing biotech companies millions of dollars. Of course, they know this, which is why they’ve sent lobbyists to tell your elected representatives that such labeling would only confuse you. You don’t want to be confused by all that complicated sciency stuff, now do you? Go back to playing Xbox and leave your food supply to the people who are profiting from it.
- Support voluntary labeling of GMOs by private business. Can’t get through to your congressman? So it goes. That’s just business. Luckily, there’s an end-around in the form of voluntary labeling by retailers like Whole Foods. Since most processed food now contains components of GMOs, Whole Foods is introducing a third-party-verified GMO-free label. Change your citizen hat for your consumer hat and demand that other retailers introduce voluntary labeling too.
- Launch a movement to change the law. Remember that rarely used part of democracy where elected representatives make new laws and change old ones on behalf of the citizens who elected them? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that’s the stuff of fable, but at least in theory you have the right to say, hey, the law stinks and I want it changed. The relevant bit of law in this case is the extension of patent rights to genes within living organisms. It seemed like a good idea at the time: grant biotech companies patent rights so they’ll have a financial incentive to develop new GMOs, just as pharmaceutical companies need financial incentives to develop new drugs. Thing is, people are now realizing that genes are fundamentally different from drugs and combustion engines and other such patentable things, and maybe it was a really bad to allow private ownership of self-replicating lifeforms in the first place.
- Back an anti-trust investigation of Monsanto. An expert-level play for the highly motivated biotech critic. Many of Monsanto’s seed products, as well as its brand-name herbicide, enjoy extraordinarily high market share. A class-action antitrust lawsuit has already been filed, alleging a “comprehensive anti-competitive scheme.” It has also come to light that independent scientists looking into the environmental effects of GMOs must get permission to do research from gene-patent holders such as Monsanto. As Monsanto’s influence over our food supply continues to increase, the time is ripe for a government investigation.
Pick one or all, and do what you do best, whether that’s tweeting, blogging, writing to congress, spray painting, hollering from a street corner, poetizing, protesting or simply telling a friend. The real beauty of these strategies is that they don’t have to succeed in order to be effective. Simply discussing them frequently in the public domain will work. The greater the pressure, for example, to require labeling of GMO foods, the greater the incentive the biotech industry has to demonstrate that its methods and products are indeed as harmless as they claim to our health, our environment and our economy. It’s a win-win situation and every little bit helps.
The Problem with PR
A few months ago, in the early days of Twitter, an interesting thing happened. Twitter was pregnant with inclusive, bipartisan promise way back then. The future looked bright, like M.J. circa 1988 or Britney before she married K-Fed. Here’s what happened: some of the PR folks at Monsanto responded to the many angry attacks on that unpopular brand with one or two charmingly personal tweets. They wanted us to know that Monsanto is not staffed by child-eating hobgoblins; that they don’t sprinkle their cafeteria food with the salt of human tears; that they do, in fact, have lovely families, noble intentions and big hearts.
You know what, it’s easy to believe that’s true. I’ve not only met lots of “communications professionals,” I’ve been one. A few are total creeps, like this one slick dude I remember talking to several years ago who was trying to sell bottled oxygen. (A quick search revealed conclusive evidence that the product was worthless, except as a placebo, but did that deter him? No. He informed me that the manufacturers were in the process of commissioning their own scientific study which would tell the customers what he wanted them to hear.) But most are just doing a necessary, inevitable job, and some good souls have even dedicated themselves to the enlightened proposition that doing real good is the best PR play a company can make.
But the size of the hearts of public relations and marketing pros unfortunately, has little to do with the consequences of public relations and marketing. The problem with PR is that you get paid to do it. There’s an enormous bias built in.
Countless millions of dollars are paid to really impressive, intelligent, good people, so that they can tell us all about the positive side of organizations that have a strong financial interest in having us believe nice things about them. At the same time, these good people are being paid not to tell us the negative side, except as necessary damage control during a crisis. The bias is simple and obvious: huge companies like Monsanto can easily afford entire fleets of highly talented PR professionals. But you’re very unlikely to find one of these pros working for the non-profit and consumer advocacy groups that take up the other side of the question. There’s a windy silence over there, poorly filled by volunteers, amateurs, and the thin resources of what’s left of indy journalism.
If there’s evil in public relations and marketing, it doesn’t proceed from the moral qualities of those in the profession. If proceeds from the fact that PR people and marketers have to eat, and pay for their mortgages. Look for them, and you will find them working diligently, honestly and with the best intentions for whatever company and whatever political party has the necessary cash. The net effect of the entire profession, no matter what individuals in it may aspire to, is not the unveiling of truth or the pursuit of the public good, but more power to money.
[This post was brought to you by someone who wasn't paid to write it, and therefore will probably never write something like this again. He has to eat.]
What You Don’t Know About Olive Oil
Of all the products on the supermarket shelf, one that has always concerned me very little is olive oil. This, after all, is a straightforward product, unlike so many of the highly processed, food-industry offerings with their long lists of mystery ingredients. Olive oil is simple and wholesome, its healthful properties well known for thousands of years.
Or so I assumed. One of the first things you find when you Google around the subject a bit is Tom Mueller’s excellent article, “Slippery Business: The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil,” published last year in The New Yorker. An enlightening piece. And not in a good way. Because it turns out the olive oil trade is to Italians what to cocaine trade is to some Columbians: a great way to get rich by flouting the law.
In the last decade there have been several high-profile criminal investigations in Italy, all revolving around the common practice of adulterating olive oil. Many Italian bottlers import cheaper olive oil from countries like Turkey and Tunisia (much to the annoyance of Italian olive farmers). Sometimes the oil being disgorged by tanker ships in Italian ports doesn’t come from olives at all. A simple change to the ship’s manifest mid-voyage transforms a cargo of cheap Turkish hazelnut oil into extra virgin olive oil from Greece. It’s a highly profitable business diluting the real stuff with lower quality olive oils and other kinds of vegetable oil, and unless you have a home chromatography kit, you’re unlikely to be able to detect that you’ve been swindled.
The fraud doesn’t just mean that there’s a decent chance your big-brand olive oil, bottled in Italy, has been adulterated. It also means that honest bottlers are forced out of business, since they can’t compete with the prices offered by bottlers of the adulterated stuff. It’s a good corollary of Gresham’s law: the bad drives out the good. Everybody suffers, except the crooks.
Although there’s definitely such a thing as excellent Italian olive oil, as recently as 2007 less than half of the “extra virgin” olive oil shipped from Italy actually met the necessary standard.
The blossoming Californian olive oil industry, on the other hand, looks like a godsend to lovers of good food in North America. Affordable, single-estate olive oils abound. It is estimated the production of olive oil in California will increase 30-fold over the next 20 years. Adulteration, thus far, is not a problem.
So what’s a shopper to do? Well, first, understand that the supermarket is not your friend. Big chain grocery stores must use big suppliers. The profitable trade in adulterated olive oil flows mostly through these giant supply chains. Most big grocery stores offer only the illusion of choice: many brands of “extra virgin” olive oil all coming from the same network of large-scale producers. “Bottled in Italy” on the label does not mean the olive oil inside is Italian, nor is it a sign of quality. There might be a good, inexpensive olive oil among the many brands, but it’s usually hard to know which is which.
Government agencies aren’t going to help you out either. They’ve got their hands full worrying about melamine and tainted peanut butter. Adulteration of olive oil is a rip-off, but it isn’t a critical health threat, so the government ignores it. The rule is caveat emptor.
The best way to score the good stuff is to find one of those specialty food boutiques where wealthy socialites hang out, or maybe a European cafe with a little corner full of goodies from the homeland. Or you can order online from a Californian artisanal producer. The stuff I got from Bariani in the mail was very high quality and reasonably priced too.
Warning: once an olive oil snob, always an olive oil snob. You’ll never be happy paying top dollar for the thin stuff again. As it should be.
