When it comes to olive oil, the manufacturers often use their labels to deceive customers of the wrong quality /.
Autumn in Tuscany. A hill on the edge of the Montalbano mountains west of Florence. Ranges of hills stretch in the distance. Olives patter through the washing system of an oil mill. Andreas März, founder of the company, seems tense. Now, at the latest, in the oil mill, it is decided whether good oil is made from good olives. However, this does not seem like a great art: According to their labels, the bottles on the supermarket shelves almost without exception contain “extra virgin olive oil”, i.e. of the very highest quality. Andreas März gives an explanation of this mass quality miracle: “Label fraud!”, He says.
There are many foods with trickery or even fraud. However, according to a scientific study published in the Journal of Food Science 2010, olive oil is the most commonly affected. One of the reasons: good olive oil is a rare juice. “Oleum” was in great demand around the Mediterranean as fuel for oil lamps, medicine, cosmetics and food. It became the epitome of all liquids that do not mix with water, which we now summarize under the umbrella term “oil”.
The groves full of olive trees with their gnarled, sometimes wondrously twisted trunks and their leaves that gleam silvery-green in the sunlight have always shaped the landscapes around the Mediterranean. An oil mill is the last stop on the way …
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