guardian.co.ukSo you might have cleared space on your balcony for a container garden, or even planted a little plot in your backyard. Still, you may not have the time, space, or expertise to branch out--say, with a peach tree, or an olive tree, or even a few pigs. But if you want a farm harvest without the farm, consider adoption. At the Masumoto Family Farm near Fresno, California--at times a supplier to Blue Hill, Per Se, and Chez Panisse--Elberta peach trees are available for "adoption." Each winter, prospective owners apply to own a peach tree; the Masumotos take care of planting, pruning, and raising your baby. Then at midsummer harvest, adopters come out to the farm to pick the trees...
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Photograph by roboppy on Flickr. Aggressive olive farming techniques for cheap, mass-produced olive oil now means extreme water shortages in Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Farms that produce the low-priced oils are driving out the small olive farmers who produce the quality goods—and are also leading to other "serious environmental problems" such as soil erosion. Inappropriate weed-control and soil control, combined with the inherently high risk of erosion in many olive-farming areas, is leading to desertification on a wide scale in some of the main producing regions. If these irresponsible farming methods continue, we might be demanding for butter instead of olive oil at our favorite restaurants....
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Adopt one of Italy's Nudo estate olive trees and you'll be sent all your tree’s produce for a year. Each tree produces about 2 liters of oil a year and Nudo guarantees a minimum of 1.5 liters....
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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...
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Harold McGee knows everything, including the reason why milk, butter, olive oil and beer taste funny if exposed to light for too long....
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