For millennia, fresh olive oil has been a necessity – for food, medicine, beauty, and religion. Today’s researchers continue to confirm the remarkable, life-giving properties of true extra-virgin, and ‘extra-virgin Italian’ has become the highest standard of quality. But what if this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt? Starting with an explosive article in The New Yorker, Tom Mueller has become the world’s expert on olive oil and olive oil fraud – a story of globalization, deception, and crime from ancient times to the present, and a powerful indictment of today’s lax protections against fake and even toxic food products in the United States. Extra Virginity is an inspiring account of the people who are defending the extraordinary oils that truly deserve the name ‘extra-virgin.’
eMusic Review 0
01.24.12
Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
2011 | Label: Dreamscape
“A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world’s answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals.”
This is one of those books, you know the type. Maybe you’ve seen the ones about bananas, or tomatoes, or tea? It’s one of those fascinating “food biographies” so bursting with facts and vignettes that you adopt more than a newfound respect for the subject — you start to think it’s the most important thing in the history of the world. Okay, beg your pardon, that’s a wild hyperbole, but Tom Mueller’s sensuous storytelling stimulates the romantic mind. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil makes the case that its slippery subject has been capturing imaginations and greasing the wheels of progress since Athena planted the first olive tree way back when. Indeed, olive oil has been used as a cure-all, an aphrodisiac, a religious ointment, a perfume, a preservative, a lubricant…hell, some people even cook with it. But real-deal extra virgin olive oil, the pure stuff, is so precious and so often swapped out with low-quality, deceitfully labeled impostors, you may never have tasted it. As Mueller’s marvelous chorus of oil-swishing taste experts gripe in the opening chapter, the industry is hopelessly corrupt. Olive oil is constantly being diluted, counterfeited and sullied by greedy and unscrupulous heathens, and no international laws or standards are forcing them to live up to their labels. I wouldn’t wanna be them when Athena gets back.