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Don’t forget to enter our great 2012 Quality is Clear Cut Subscriber Competition, generously sponsored by Eclipse Enterprises Australia. Just tell us about how you prune your grove and you’ll be in the running to win one of three great prizes, each valued at over $2,600. Entry forms in the Mar-May and June-July editions of Olivegrower & Processor or via the competition link in the ad below. Entries close June 30 – don’t miss out on your chance to win the latest new pruning equipment from Campagnola.
In 300 BC, the Syrian city of Antioch had public street lighting fuelled by olive oil. At the 1900 Paris World Fair, German inventor Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his engine powered by peanut oil. Biofuels are not new, but many of the technologies are; and interest in renewable, sustainable biofuels has recently been rising due to worry about peak oil and price pressures, vulnerability of energy supplies, dependence on imports and greenhouse emissions. In April this year, Qantas made its first flight using a 50-50 blend of refined cooking oil and regular jet fuel.
Congratulations to Fair Go this week for a thorough, no-nonsense comparison of New Zealand extra virgin olive oil and the so-called European extra virgin olive oils sold in supermarkets, says Herald columnist Paul Holmes, who also declares his interest as a New Zealand producer of extra virgin olive oil.
The program sent 14 extra virgin olive oils bought at 14 supermarkets off to Australia for testing. The entire seven randomly-chosen European oils all failed to pass the extra virgin test.
It’s a good time to think big when it comes to growing table olives in California, and fewer trees this year are going into the ground in the state to produce olive oil. But production of olive oil in California is expected to nearly double over the next few years. And both industries have a common enemy — imports of questionable quality. Those were among observations at a University of California program in Tulare where participants also heard the latest on mechanical harvesting, olive knot and verticillium management and use of olive mill waste water for nutrition and for management of olive diseases and insect pests.
A decline in olive and pomace oil imports into Canada and Australia is “worrying,” the International Olive Council declares in its April newsletter. It reports that October-February imports into Canada and Australia were 20 and 5% lower respectively than the same period last season. “This is particularly worrying” it says “because this downward movement has been happening for three months in a row.”
Sales of imported food items are growing at 20-25% and are seen touching 30-35% in the next two years. The sales of olive oil have overtaken those of Saffola, a premium cooking medium made from sunflower seeds, in Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar, the food and grocery retail chains of India’s largest listed retail company Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd. That olive oil costs two-and-a-half times the price of regular sunflower oil and is at least 25% more expensive than Saffola hasn’t deterred buyers.
Despite their reputation for being very much an acquired taste, the lowly olive has actually been one of the most important crops in human history. First cultivated more than 10,000 years ago, olives have been used in food, hygiene products, religion, medicine, and in the lamps that lit the homes of the great thinkers of our past such as Homer and Socrates. Virtually every culture in southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa utilized olives in their day to day lives, and in the process of founding our modern world.
An unusually well-preserved olive oil press was unearthed by archaeologists on the outskirts of the city of Modi’in in central Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced recently. The press “was used for industrial oil production for consumption and illumination about 1,400 years ago,” the IAA said. That means the press would have been active around the end of the period of Byzantine rule and the beginning of Muslim rule in 637 CE.
For the third time in eight months, the European Commission is to subsidise the temporary withdrawal of olive oil from the market in the hope rock bottom farm gate prices improve. An EC committee voted in favor of private storage aid (PSA) to cover 100,000 tons of virgin and extra virgin olive oil for up to 180 days. The aid will be available in all EU producer countries, namely Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. It is allocated via a tender process and the first offers will be accepted starting on May 31.
Think of extra virgin olive oil as wine. Like grapes, different varieties of olives have regional characteristics and bring different flavors to the oil. Not all olives are grown, harvested and pressed equally. Compared with Mediterranean populations, Americans caught on late to extra virgin olive oil, but we are trying to catch up. “In the United States, olive oil consumption is increasing each year and [people are] getting a little more sophisticated,” says Bob Profaci of Glen Rock, who is part of the family business that imports Colavita olive oils to the US.