5/11/2023 0 Comments Extra virginity book![]() ![]() ![]() In Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, Mueller, an American who lives in Italy, lays bare the workings of an industry prey, he argues, to hi-tech, industrial-scale fraud. ![]() The answer, according to Tom Mueller in a book out this month, is very often not. So with a litre of supermarket extra virgin costing up to £4, and connoisseurs willing to pay 10 times that sum for a far smaller bottle of seasonal, first cold stone pressed, single estate, artisan-milled oil from Italy or Greece, can we be sure of getting what we're paying for? We're now, in fact, the world's 10th biggest olive oil-consuming nation. ![]() Today, thanks partly to the health claims made on its behalf and partly to the fact it tastes good, the oil Homer called "liquid gold" is in half of all UK homes and we get through 30m litres of olive oil every year – more than double than we did decade ago. In Britain, of course, it wasn't so very long ago that the most likely place to find olive oil was the chemist. Most alarmingly, a study last year by researchers at the University of California, Davis and the Australian Oils Research Laboratory concluded that as much as 69% of imported European olive oil (and a far smaller proportion of native Californian) sold as extra virgin in the delicatessens and grocery stores on the US west coast wasn't what it claimed to be. ![]()
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