Serious Eats
E.V. Oh No! Fraud in the Olive Oil Business
If you've watched enough '80s cop dramas, you're probably familiar with the concept of shady international cartels "cutting" illicit drugs to make a shipment go farther on the street. But who would have thought the same thing would go down with olive oil?
This week's New Yorker magazine has a lengthy feature on fraud in the olive oil business, detailing recent scandals of hazelnut oil–adulterated extra-virgins while delving into what turns out to be a long history of such shenanigans.
Most olive-oil frauds are easy to detect using chemical tests. In February, 2005, the N.A.S. Carabinieri broke up a criminal ring operating in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand litres of fake olive oil, with a street value of six million euros (about eight million dollars). The ring, which allegedly sold its products in northern Italy and in Germany, is accused of coloring low-grade soy oil and canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, flavoring it with beta-carotene, and packaging it as extra-virgin olive oil in tins and bottles emblazoned with pictures of Italian flags or Mt. Vesuvius, and with folksy names of imaginary producers—the Farmhouse, the Ancient Millstones.