olive oil adulteration

adulteration \| false labeling \| optical illusions

adulteration
In these days of loose morals it is becoming quite difficult to be sure your olive oil is truly virgin, let alone extra virgin. Deniability is a big part of the game.
When you buy a product with lower grades oils mixed into the extra virgin olive oil, you are not only cheated of your money, but also of your families' health. You get less real extra virgin olive oil in you diet and therefore less of the health benefits to your heart and arteries.
Please read the 6 page article called "Slippery Business The trade in adulterated olive oil." by Tom Mueller New Yorker Magazine - Aug.13, 2007. He tells of a 1992 investigation that discovered "adulterated [olive] oil had gone to some of the largest producers of Italian olive oil, among them Nestlé, Unilever, Bertolli, and Oleifici Fasanesi, who sold it to consumers as olive oil... (These companies claimed that they had been swindled ... and prosecutors were unable to prove complicity on their part.)" Muller points out that "olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils ... and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil."
Mueller interviewed Leonardo Marseglia, the managing director of an olive-oil and vegetable-oil company in Monopoli, one of the leading olive-oil importers in Europe and owns one of the largest edible-oil refineries in the world. Marseglia said that he had earned the resentment of local farmers by importing foreign olive oil. He insisted this was necessary, not only to satisfy Italy’s internal demand but also to improve the poor quality of some of the local oil. Marseglia said, "You have to import six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand tons a year. And since we imported a lot, to make blends to save many bad, smelly local oils, people basically saw it as an affront."		Here is the "Proposed USDA United States Standards for Grades of Olive Oil and Olive-Pomace Oil March 28, 2008 DRAFT" and here is the International Olive Oil Council's 24 November 2006 Trade Standard Applying to Olive Oils and Olive-Pomace Oils. (Click the links to see the original pdf versions of these IOOC & USDA documents)
Marseglia also estimated that 90% of the oil sold in Italy as extra virgin is not really of extra virgin quality.
Mueller describes in detail similar crimes in the US "In February, 2006, federal marshals seized about sixty-one thousand liters of what was supposedly extra-virgin olive oil and twenty-six thousand liters of a lower-grade olive oil from a New Jersey warehouse. Some of the oil, which consisted almost entirely of soybean oil, was destined for a company called Krinos Foods, a member of the North American Olive Oil Association. Krinos blamed the fraud on its supplier, DMK Global Marketing, which in turn blamed the Italian bottlers from whom it had bought the oil. The marshals destroyed the oil, but no criminal charges were brought against Krinos or any other companies. “My experience over a period of some fifty years suggests that we can always expect adulteration and mislabeling of olive-oil products in the absence of surveillance by official sources,” David Firestone, an F.D.A. chemist who was the agency’s olive-oil specialist from the mid-sixties to 1999, told me."