Alex Renton

Olive oil – 5000 years of fraud and poisoning

alexanderrenton — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:10:36 +0000

The olive harvest: the money in olives has always been an enemy of tradition and quality Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

Book review: The Observer, Sunday 15 January, 2012

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller

Is there any foodstuff as dodgy as olive oil? Human beings have been defrauding and occasionally poisoning one another with the stuff – or simulacra of it – since the beginning of cooking. You may fairly picture a Sumerian house-spouse 5,000 years ago frowning at an amphora and saying: “The guy said he actually cold-presses extra virgin olives in his own kitchen. Funny taste, though…” Luckily, according to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Ebla, the Sumerians had a royally appointed olive oil fraud brigade.

That’s the sort of thing we need now, when the profits in olive oil crime are, as one EU official puts it, “comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks”, and the regulations less effective than at any time in the last two millennia.

Tom Mueller, in this eye-popping investigation, makes a convincing case that the fraudsters are busier and richer now than ever before. Key to their success is the confusion, snobbery and ignorance that shroud the product. I have a little experience of this: I conducted a blind tasting of extra virgin olive oils a few years ago for a national newspaper that wanted “the truth on expensive olive oil”.

We had a dozen oils, and a panel consisting of an importer, an Italian deli owner and a couple of eminent foodies: the results were so embarrassing and confusing the piece was never published. The importer went into a fugue after he was informed that he’d pronounced his own premium product “disgusting”; the deli owner chose a bottle of highly dubious “Italian extra virgin” as his favourite (it had cost £1.99 at the discount store TK Maxx); and both the foodies gave a thumbs-up to Unilever‘s much-derided Bertolli brand.

The story of the latter, a market leader here and in the United States, provides a good tour of the rottenness in the trade. The Bertollis were bankers and traders who never actually owned an olive tree, despite the bucolic Tuscan scenes depicted on their labels. They got rich on the back of the incomprehensible twist in European law that, until 2001, allowed any olive oil bottled in Italy to be sold as “Italian olive oil”, which, absurdly, is what we all pay most for. In fact, even now 80% of the oil Bertolli uses comes from Spain, North Africa and the Middle East. It it is still flogged in bottles with “Lucca” and “Passione Italiana” on the label. Today, Italy still sells three times as much oil as it produces.

More serious – for aficionados and olive farmers – Bertolli and its supermarket rivals corrupted the meaning of extra virginity, a controlled definition of high-quality oil since 1960. “Gentle”, “smooth” and “not peppery on the throat” are the sort of words Bertolli and its rivals used in ads promoting their generic extra virgin oil. But true extra virgin oil is peppery – it bites the back of the throat so fiercely it can make you cough. The flavours are vivid. “Peppery” is an official, positive attribute of “extra virgin” whereas smoothness will reliably indicate a low-quality oil.

So Bertolli and the other brands came to need low-quality oils in order to produce an expensive one. That suits them, naturally, but it is ruinous to people trying to make and sell the proper stuff. And it suits the fraudsters, who, for millennia, have been passing off oil from all sorts of plants as that of olives. The deodorising and cleaning techniques that are used to render seed oil or even oil chemically extracted from the stones and twigs of olives produce a very bland oil.

It has become almost impossible for the processors to tell when they’re being sold fake oil and, as one sadly tells Mueller, even harder for them to sell good oil for a reasonable price: “When a customer tries a robust oil, they say, ‘Oh no, this is a bad oil!’ He’s become used to the flat taste of the deodorato.” As a result, 70% of cheaper extra virgin oil sold is a fraud, according to Mueller – though that doesn’t harm the big guys. And so the Bertolli family sold up to Unilever, a company that got rich turning waste animal fats and whale oil into margarine. (Unilever has now sold Bertolli to Spain’s biggest oil corporation.)

It is an appalling and comical mess, which Mueller sees largely in terms of honest, hard-working farmers versus slippery businessmen. He interviews prime examples of both. But you could tell the same story of almost any artisan’s product we put in our mouths, from bacon to cheddar cheese or smoked salmon. Industrial production techniques and the supermarket’s tendency to strip out quality in order to give “value” will debase any foodstuff once it becomes popular to the point where the producer has to abuse his animals, sin against tradition or commit fraud in order to stay afloat.

It is a depressing story, without any obvious remedy, but it is only half this greatly entertaining book. Mueller, an American who set up home in Liguria, tells a gripping story of the rise of olive oil to the point where it symbolises civilisation – whether in the minds of a Roman legionary miserable in the lard-eating German outposts of the Empire, or on an aspirational dinner table in middle-class northern Europe or America today.

Olive oil runs through Mediterranean culture. It had a place in religious rituals, cooking, lighting, cleaning, medicine and, of course, economics. Mueller makes a case – or at least he finds an academic who will – for olive oil’s central role in pederasty in ancient Athens. Across the ages, the cool green oil flows, past an unchanging cast of cranks, crooks and fanatics. The Romans, says Mueller from the top of Monte Testaccio, a hill by the Tiber made of discarded oil amphorae, policed olive oil better than we do. They probably used it more sensibly, too: most of what we eat today on the cheap is actually lampante – oil of a grade they deemed suitable only for lighting their houses.

Original article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/13/extra-virginity-tom-mueller-review

Disgusting airline food and eating cheap in NYC

alexanderrenton — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:49:31 +0000

It looked a bit like this

The Times, 24 November 2011

I was so hungry on a flight to the US, I did something I haven’t since I was poisoned in-flight — I ate the food

Last week I did something really stupid: I got on an plane without having had breakfast. And the flight was seven and a half hours in economy. And I had one piece of chewing gum on me. So, over the mid-Atlantic, the hunger pangs became too much and I did something I haven’t since I was poisoned in-flight three years ago by Alitalia — I ate the food.

Nearly everyone was doing it; this being a flight to the US, they were clearly people who knew food. Many knew it in such quantity they needed two seats. Though most people guzzled from the plastic trays, my neighbours and I agreed that Continental Airlines serve the most revolting food we had ever encountered one mile up.

The best thing on the tray was the packlet of Kerrygold butter. The “salad” was shredded iceberg lettuce, one miserable rabbit’s poo of an olive and an eighth of a small tomato. There was a pasta dish — “chicken marinara” — whose pasta was so overcooked it turned to mush on your tongue, and the tomato sauce so acid and sweet you thought you’d already been sick. I didn’t eat the chicken because I have young children.

I won’t go on, but it was interesting that airline food has got worse since I gave it up (and this was no budget ticket). There was of course a reason, apparent when you opened the in-flight magazine. It listed dishes available in business class that you could buy to eat in economy. So Continental’s strategy — new to the world of catering — seemed to be to serve disgusting food free to persuade people to pay for slightly better food. I wonder if it’ll take off.

In any case, I arrived in Manhattan incredibly hungry. That I dealt with straight out of the airport taxi: an absolutely gorgeous falafel, salad and hot sauce, wrapped in hot pitta, from a stall on Union Square. Bliss it was. But there weren’t many meals much more memorable in the next four days.

I ate posh, I ate in bars, I ate in delis and I ate in Pret A Manger. The posh was a let-down: pompous, with that endless litany of specials delivered by grave waiters at your table. The dishes when they arrived were the opposite of the US norm: small, fussy and surprisingly expensive.

My best New York experiences, as ever, were ethnic — melting Southern barbecue pork in a Union Square sports bar, a good spicy time at the Grand Sichuan on St Mark’s Place. The lower down the food price chain you went, the more fun and friendly the service. Best of all was a takeout from the highly recommended Vietnamese-inspired Midtown Num Pang Sandwich Shop (numpangnyc.com): I had five-spiced glazed pork belly with pickled pear in a roll, and a corn-on-the cob chargrilled with chilli and coconut mayo smeared on it. Fantastic and delivered steaming hot in 20 minutes. Why don’t British cities do things like that?

Tesco and Asda have had their dubious price-war bargains exposed in The Times recently. Many discounts turn out to be either puny or based on just a week or so at the higher price. Now reader Clare Stanton finds dodgy goings on at Marks & Spencer. Its Milk Chocolate Balls, aimed at Christmas tables, can’t decide if they’re “three for the price of two” or “half-price deal of the week”. And they haven’t been sold at their “real” price, £10, since October. Which is nearer Harvest Festival than Christmas. Tut.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

Jamie’s great – or simply good?

alexanderrenton — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:23:25 +0000

3rd November 2011, The Times

His new book is tipped to be No 1 and a TV show (his 21st) is under way. Is Jamie Oliver the Elizabeth David of our time?

Jamie Oliver

When Jamie Oliver addressed the United Nations last month — not words I thought I’d ever write — I went to the end of the kitchen bookshelf and pulled out a battered, rather sticky volume called The Naked Chef. It might contain, I thought, some clues to explain one of the most extraordinary — and high-speed — career paths of our times.

Published just 12 years ago, The Naked Chef has a tousle-haired bloke on the front with a sweet grin and a Hawaiian shirt. Inside he lays out a range of simple, smiley dishes with the message: “Go on, get stuck in!”

Food, hunger and happiness in Armenia

alexanderrenton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:48:34 +0000

I went to Armenia in April 2011 for Oxfam, the Times and the BBC. On The Culture Show BBC2, 28 October I told how that story was done, in words and pictures. Here’s more from the trip:

Food foraging in Armenia: an Audio Slideshow

June 2011, BBC Online

Churchill and Armenian brandy

BBC Radio 4, From Our Own Correspondent, July 2011

Is this the worst dish in the world?

May 28, 2011, The Times.

Khash must be stewed for 32 hours

Recipe: Take 4 cow’s hooves and ankles and 1 brain (optional); boil for 32 hours (without seasoning); remove scum; gnaw bones with salt and pickles. Drink a shot of vodka with each mouthful.

KHASH, “the masterpiece of Armenian cuisine”, is always eaten early in the morning. “It is not wise to eat it late,” says our host, Shirak. “Khash is so rich, you need all day to digest it.” He takes us to visit the kitchen the night before the feast; we inspect the great pot where four cow’s feet and ankles and one bovine brain are bubbling. “It started cooking last night, because khash must be stewed for 32 hours,” says Shirak. We agree to meet when that time is up: at 7am.

I wake with a sense of dread. I dreamt I was back at school, faced with an important exam: Shirak was the invigilator. When I get downstairs, I think how much I would give for a cup of tea and no breakfast-time challenges. But on the table is a pile of crispy lavash flatbread, some radishes, a bowl of crushed garlic and salt. And a bottle of vodka.

Read on at The Times Online

The Truth about Tesco’s not-so-big price drop

alexanderrenton — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:41:11 +0000

The Truth about Tesco 2011: graphic from The Times

17th October 2011, The Times

Dozens of the savings offered by Tesco in its “Big Price Drop” — the £500 million campaign that started a supermarket price war three weeks ago — are on foods that were sold only briefly at the higher price, research by The Times has shown.

Huge advertising promotions this month have promised discounts on 3,000 items. “Sometimes you have to put aside just the pursuit of profit in order to get back in tune with the nation,” said Tesco chief executive Phil Clarke as Big Price Drop launched. But Tesco appears to have raised the price of hundreds of items in the weeks before the promotion, perhaps to make the subsequent offers look more attractive.

You can read the full article on Times Online

How will climate change affect Britain’s crops?

alexanderrenton — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:15:19 +0000

11th October 2009, The Observer

Olives, kiwi fruit, almonds – as the climate gets hotter in the UK, we may well be producing our own exotic crops

Far from the failed harvests, droughts and floods of Asia, Mark Diacono is expecting some good to come of climate change. On his 17-hectare farm beside the Otter river in north Devon, he is experimenting with the crops that might provide a living for farmers in the warmer, wetter Britain of the near future. So far the only thing he has really harvested is TV coverage – it only takes British agriculture, “food security” and climate change to be mentioned together for television news to be on the phone asking if they can send a crew to his orchards.

Nearly five years since he started his “climate change farm”, Diacono says results have been mixed. “Two olive species did well and two not. The almonds have not worked: there were two bad summers in a row. You have to take it on the chin if you’re going to try this stuff.”

Read the rest here at Guardian Online

Paying more for Fairtrade cocoa is key to ending child labour

alexanderrenton — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:26:03 +0000

30th September 2010 The Times

To eat chocolate is to enter a moral maze. It has been associated with indulgence and sex and more recently, justice

To eat chocolate is to enter a moral maze. It has always been associated with indulgence and sex — if you believe the advertising — and the newest selling point is justice: “fairly traded” chocolate that promises a decent livelihood for the cocoa farmers. In the past year this has become mainstream: Cadbury (with Dairy Milk) and Nestlé (with KitKat) have gone into Fairtrade, and some Mars products carry the less-exacting Rainforest Alliance label. You can have chocolate both sinful and worthy simultaneously: “Indulge your sweet tooth with this decadent collection of Fairtrade Belgian chocolates . . .” runs an ad on the Oxfam shop website.

Can you taste that goodness? At a party I handed round two plates of chocolate squares. They looked identical but I said one had Fairtrade chocolate on it, the other was conventional: I wanted to know which tasted better. My subjects voted in favour of the Fairtrade chocolate, and with a political bias: the more liberal-minded, the more they preferred the Fairtrade. I’d conned them, of course: the two chocolates were the same, which made everyone cross.

Read the rest via Times Online

My experience of London? Pride came before offal

alexanderrenton — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:43:41 +0000

On a trip to the capital, our writer feasts on oysters and damsons, and discovers a gem of a restaurant in the East End

15th September, 2011

The Times

I lived in London for half my life but I approach the city now with flutters in the stomach. A committed vegetarian I know who leaves the West Country twice a year for the Smoke says that, faced with the urban challenge, he lapses. He goes straight from Paddington Station to Burger King for a meat protein blast. Arriving last week from Scotland, I went — in the same spirit — directly to a Bayswater pub for a pint of much-missed southern bitter. Relieving me without a smile of almost £4, the barman asked me to take off my cap “for security reasons”. It isn’t Leith.

But there are joys. Fuller’s London Pride. A chilli-sauce-laden doner kebab stuffed into pitta bread in Shepherds Bush. Neal’s Yard’s organic Greek yoghurt. A stroll through Borough Market. And, of course, there are restaurants.

Read the rest here via Times Online

Male bonding: The public schoolboy

alexanderrenton — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:18:56 +0000

7th August 2010

If ex public schoolboys are “the most screwed-up socioethnic sub-group”, it’s no wonder we struggle to find male friends.

I wish I’d married a man,” a friend said to me. He sighed: “There’d still be no sex but there’d be more conversation.” I’d been up very early and I’d texted him saying “Let’s talk”, because there was business to be done: a sailing weekend to plan, a catch-up on our family dramas, some advice I needed on some work. And here we were, an hour into that chat and still with half-a-dozen enticing alleys to wander down. We had to stop: there were children stirring, cups of tea to take to wives in bed.

Read on at Times Online

Making £50 a week taste better

alexanderrenton — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:54:37 +0000

After I tried to feed my family on Sainsbury’s menu, I appealed to Times readers for better ideas

7th July 2011

The Times

Two months ago, Sainsbury’s launched a “value” marketing drive, with TV and press campaigns, promising to feed recession-hit families for just £50 a week. The first menu was depressing with its pseudo-bargains, unlikely extravagances (a £5 bunch of grapes) and lots of tinned and frozen food. These included some sausages at 10p each: beige and tasteless, just 45 per cent pork, they were the most revolting things that have ever been in my frying pan.

All this was mocked on these pages and elsewhere, especially when the company was pushed to admit that in nutritional terms the menu would in fact provide only 85 per cent of what a family would need. Unsurprisingly, the promotion has now disappeared from Sainsbury’s stores and website.

“Marketing froth” was one trade analyst’s verdict: that rang true in this house. When I tried to send my kids off to school on the budget breakfast of toast and jam, they were as appalled as if I’d attempted to ban the TV. What is wrong with porridge, many of you asked.

Read the rest here via Times Online