From 2007: Tom Mueller explores the trade in adulterated olive oil, a business so prevalent in Europe that it became the focus of an anti-fraud olive-oil task force. NewYorkerArchive
“Fraud is so widespread that few growers can make an honest living,” one expert says.On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal II docked at the industrial port of Ordu, in Turkey, and pumped twenty-two hundred tons of hazelnut oil into its hold. The ship then embarked on a meandering voyage through the Mediterranean and the North Sea.
In Puglia, which produces about forty per cent of Italy’s olives, growers have been in a near-constant state of crisis for more than a decade. “Thousands of olive-oil producers are victims of this ‘drugged’ market,” Antonio Barile, the president of the Puglia chapter of a major farmers’ union, told me, referring to illegal importations of seed oils and cheap olive oil from outside the E.U., which undercut local farmers.
According to E.U. law, extra-virgin oil must be made exclusively by physical means and meet thirty-two chemical requirements, including having “free acidity” of no more than 0.8 per cent. Virgin oil, the next grade lower, must have free acidity of no more than two per cent. Oil that has a greater percentage of free acidity is classified asMost olive-oil frauds are easy to detect using chemical tests. In February, 2005, the N.A.S.
One morning last October, the Mastri Oleari’s olive-oil tasting panel—six men and three women—conducted a test of five premium oils, all known to be extra-virgin. The test was a training exercise, one of about twenty that the panelists perform each year to keep their tasting skills sharp. The Mastri Oleari’s tasting room consisted of eight cubicles, which isolate panel members to prevent them from influencing one another’s judgments.
In other words, the ancient Romans anticipated fraud of the kind perpetrated by Domenico Ribatti, and took more effective steps to prevent it than Italians do today. In April, Paolo De Castro, the agriculture minister, announced that the government had investigated seven hundred and eighty-seven olive-oil producers and found that two hundred and five were guilty of adulteration, false labelling, and other infractions.
In a ruling on January 13, 1997, Italy’s Supreme Court noted that the magistrate who authorized the arrests of Marseglia and his associates had “amply demonstrated, with documentary evidence, that the product unloaded in Monopoli was extra-EC olive oil from Tunisia, free from import tariffs, which was subsequently made to appear to be Italian olive oil using false sales transactions, resulting in serious EC fraud.
Marseglia estimated that ninety per cent of oil sold in Italy as extra-virgin isn’t of premium grade. “It’s anything but extra-virgin, the oil we have here,” he said. He did not seem to think that this was a problem. “First of all, let’s give people good oil,” he said.
Marseglia passed me the bottle. “Now you taste it, without doing what those other guys do,” he said. “Pretend you’re eating a candy, something good. Then we’ll see how it leaves your mouth.” He watched my face intently as I swallowed the oil, then nodded, satisfied. “Tasting things is simple,” he said.
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