Snippets from the Italian Scene
Olive Oil Fraud: Unexpected
Effects of Another Provision
I'm not with Italian Prime Minister Mr. Berlusconi on another provision he has enacted, which requires that all foreign documents presented in Italian courts receive a seal of authenticity from a government office in the country of origin. The stated goal of the law is to provide Italian defendants with a guarantee that the prosecution won't trot out false documents, for example doctored bank records from a Swiss bank in a corruption trial, and indeed its practical effect is to make following the money in cases of corruption and bribery much more difficult. The provision is having a pernicious effect in food, too, however, because food fraud generally involves falsifying documents, and if the fraud takes place across international borders, the new law says that the fraudulent documents from abroad must have the seal of authenticity from the government of origin, which will obviously be difficult to get.
For example, a news analysis program called Report that's transmitted by RAI 3, one of the State-owned networks, discussed a case in which a boatload of olio di sansa, the oil that's extracted through heat and chemical processing of the olive pulp after the extravirgin oil has been pressed out, spent a few days in a Turkish port and returned with papers certifying that it was Extravirgin olive oil. A clear case of fraud, but the foreign documents in the paper trail didn't have the seal of authenticity required by the new Italian law and the judge who tried the case was forced to set the perpetrators free. This is not how things are supposed to work.
Nor was the remainder of the program more reassuring; it turns out that almost all of the Virgin and Extravirgin olive oil produced by large commercial Italian olive oil plants owes its certification to slight of hand of one sort or another. Much is olio lampante, which is made from olives that have fallen from the trees, are collected with huge vacuum cleaners, and pressed, at which point the resulting oil is reprocessed to make it palatable. It shouldn't be extravirgin, but that's what it's sold as. How to keep from being snookered? As I've said before, buy olive oil that's estate pressed and bottled, and remember that you get what you pay for. Good olive oil comes from olives that are handpicked before they're ripe, and the labor involved is expensive. So cheap extravirgin Italian oil probably isn't. For more information on olive oil and purchasing tips, see Andar per Olio.
A presto,
Kyle
Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine
Thoughts on Italian food
On Italian wine
On
living in Italy
Send a card from the
Italian Cuisine Post Office, or browse the photos!
