A brief history of olive oil: Everything Old is New Again

Everything Old is New Again (A brief history of olive oil)

Quick! Name something that you can eat that’s been on this old planet for nearly ten thousand years. It’s also something that was and is used for medicine, beauty, cooking, and religious rituals. Oh, and a war was started over it too.

If this were the Jeopardy television show, the metronome would be ticking and that famous melody written by Merv Griffin would be playing in the background. But this isn’t TV. I’m just trying to think of something to stump my friends when we play trivia during our Friday evening attitude adjustment session at our favorite restaurant.

There’s this new guy someone brought to the group last Friday. Brian. He’s an accountant and a closet chef. You know. One of the new breed of men who watches Food Network, has real food in his refrigerator instead of take-out containers, and knows the difference between supermarket olive oil and cold-press extra virgin olive oil. I bet he won’t be able to name this mysterious something I described.

If this were the Jeopardy show, right about now, I’d be shouting: “What is olive oil?”

I must confess, I was astounded to find out humans have been consuming olive oil for thousands of years, but that’s what my mom told me.

You see, I’d given my mother a lesson in the value of olive oil as opposed to those supermarket vegetable oils she always bought. I convinced her to start using olive oil, but she wasn’t content just to order a bottle of extra virgin olive oil like mine. She had to research the subject and find out every little thing about olives and the oil from them.

Sheesh. Having a mother who’s a history teacher is sometimes annoying. Why? Because she’s not happy just to learn something. The teacher in her makes her want to pass on the knowledge. Unfortunately, she passes it to me whether I want it or not. All grumbling aside, I really don’t mind. I learn a lot from her. But don’t tell her that.

She’s the one who told me that olive trees first appeared about 6000 B.C.E. in Asia Minor–call it modern-day Turkey. But archaeologists and paleobotanists, maybe call them eggheads, can’t agree exactly where on that peninsula. I can well imagine how those egghead experts argue about such things, but they do agree that the olive tree became domesticated about 3,000 years later when people were no longer content with finding trees growing in the wild and picking the olives. They brought the trees into their gardens and started cultivating them.

How the tree spread from country to country would be better studied in world history because that kind of course teaches about invading and occupying armies and all the wars that seemed to go on in ancient times. And that’s pretty much how the olive tree migrated. For example, the Venetians and Turks invaded Crete and took the tree with them. Then the Romans did the same in Spain.

It’s pretty amazing how much is known about the history of olive oil. I guess that’s because, from the beginning, it was a prized commodity. Laws and regulations about the trees and the oil were passed. These people were serious about their olive oil. There was even a law that sentenced to death someone who deliberately cut down an olive tree. The trees were counted, oil pots too, and records were kept about all these things.

In regions producing olive oil, even back then, it was recognized for its health benefits. It was also consumed and used in beauty products and perfumes. Merchants traded it. Christian, Jewish, and pagans used it in religious rites. That war I mentioned? That was fought between the Greeks and the Maccabees a few thousand years ago.

In the United States, olive oil is riding a wave of popularity as more and more people embrace its use. Seems kind of odd that something that’s been around all these thousands of years is considered “the new kid on the block” by some. It just goes to show: everything old is new again.

I guess I’m just an EVOO evangelist. I hook people because of the taste or because of the coronary health benefits. Then I reel them in over a saucer of warm, seasoned extra virgin olive oil and hot, crusty bread. That’s how I got my mom converted.

My order for Frantoio Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Tuscany arrived today. Maybe I’ll ask Brian, one EVOO lover to another, to come over Saturday night and sample some. Oil, that is.

What do you think? Should I?

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