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Agromafia
- varjag 11y ago> We can call ourselves the FBI of food.
- std_throwaway 11y agoThen why are they investigating foreign products?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 11y agoBecause those products are being sold inside America.
- kifki 11y agoThey aren't. This is the Italian police investigating Italian products.
- such_a_casual 11y agoGreat question: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/justice-department-charges-leaders-of-megaupload-with-widespread-online-copyright-infringement https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/justice-dep...
- razster 11y agoNote that they're also using spy techniques, phone taps, security cameras, and audio bugs.
- Jerry2 11y ago>We were curious about what we'd find in a U.S. supermarket. So we shipped three brands of Italian extra virgin we purchased in New York back to the mother country. >They were included in a blind taste test by those experts in Rome. The process is as tightly orchestrated as a Verdi opera. Blue glass hides the oil's color. Separate cubicles prevent cheating. >The panel would not say they were adulterated - but they agreed two brands we purchased back home did not come within a sniff of extra virgin. They described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand happens to be one of the best-selling in America. Fascinating. I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil. Odds are that the extra virgin olive oil from a supermarket is just some other oil with some chlorophyll added for coloring.
- hijinks 11y agoI shop at Whole Foods which isn't cheap. The one thing I got from watching this video is. I have NEVER had extra virgin olive oil that looked like that or tasted any and had that reaction. Have I been really using fake olive oil all this time?
- skyyler 11y agoYep. Just wait until you taste the real stuff. You can buy it on amazon. It's very much worth the price.
- mistermann 11y agoIf you're not an expert, how do you know what's on Amazon is the real thing though? Also, related reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zcpt4/til_up_to_75_of_the_extra_virgin_olive_oil_sold/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zcpt4/til_u...
- HillRat 11y agoMy advice is to buy Californian olive oil -- it's becoming more expensive as people realize most European EVOO is adulterated, but it's still often cheaper and usually better than European imports. Good olive oils are a little bitter, very grassy and quite distinct; the less flavor they have the more likely they've been diluted with cheap oils, while the taste of table olives is a mark of rancidity. Also, if you haven't had true aged balsamic, get a small bottle sometime and try it on berries or good bread. The stuff you buy in the store is like petroleum waste in comparison.
- bbarn 11y agoI agree with what you've said here about taste. However, I would add that the use of extra virgin olive oil is so heavy handed with TV/marketing that people don't realize just how much specific flavor it has - and that it's not an all purpose cooking oil as much as Rachael Ray wants it to be. I actually struggle to find light olive oil in stores, which used to be more of a standard I used for light sauteing, etc. I wonder how much of the dilution is based on the over strong demand for the stuff. and lack of definition of "extra virgin" by the US market? The article mentions it must be from the first press of olives, is this a labeling law in the US?
- jkereako 11y agoBuy olive oil from California Olive Ranch. It's not great (I'm on the east coast, and the latest harvest I can find is from October, 2014), but it's most likely the real thing.
- exhilaration 11y agoTrader Joe's California Estate Olive Oil is what we buy after reading this Consumer Reports article: http://www.consumerreports.org/content/cro/en/consumer-reports-magazine/z2012/September/extraVirginOliveOil.print.html#ratings http://www.consumerreports.org/content/cro/en/consumer-repor... Our Ratings show that you don’t need to buy oil with an Italian heritage to experience the best. California, which produces about 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., is the source of the only two products judged Excellent: McEvoy Ranch (grown on a 550-acre property in Petaluma) and Trader Joe’s California Estate oil (“crafted to our specifications from the first press of Arbequina olives grown on estate ranches in the Sierra foothills”), which costs far less than McEvoy: 35 cents per ounce compared with $1.73. Three of the six Very Good oils also have a California pedigree: B.R. Cohn, 365 Everyday Value (Whole Foods), and California Olive Ranch. O-Live & Co. is pressed from Chilean olives. Only Lucini Premium Select and Kirkland Signature (Costco) Select Toscano are from olives grown in Italy. The other rated products contain olives from a mix of nations, such as Argentina, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey. Goya, a winner in our tests years ago, scored only a Fair this time around.
- meowface 11y agoI do use their olive oil. I prefer it to anything else I've tried from a grocery store. >It's not great Well, what is a great brand, then?
- jkereako 11y agoI say "not great" because in grocery stores in my area, all of the California Olive Ranch bottles are over a year old. The longer the oil sits, the worse it becomes. Also, the bottles are sitting beneath fluorescent lights. It does help that the bottles are dark green, but completely opaque is better. California Olive Ranch is a fine brand because, as far as I know, they can be trusted. That's the only reason why a brand even matters. They're members of the California Olive Council. EDIT If you're on west coast, I'd be curious to know the harvest date listed on your bottle.
- galfarragem 11y agoThe relationship between quality and price of goods is, in most of cases, an hyperbolic function. Unless we are experts we can't really feel the quality difference between a $25 vs a $50 gallon of olive oil. The same for wine. Maybe most people can spot the difference between a €2 vs a €10 bottle (wine in my country is cheap..), but not between a €10 vs a €20 bottle.
- legulere 11y agoHuman sensing is very relative. Just two days ago I was in a museum about tricks of the senses [1]. At one station there were three sandpapers. One fine, one medium and one coarse. You had to first rub your hands on the outer ones simultaneously and then both on the one in the middle (the medium one) at the same time. Although it was one uniform sandpaper it felt different depending on the hand. I think with taste and smell it's very similar that smaller differences only really matter in direct comparison. Even experts after training will have a hard time, there are some studies out there where sommeliers didn't notice they got white wine with red food colouring. [1]: http://turmdersinne.de/en/home http://turmdersinne.de/en/home
- lukeschlather 11y agoThe difference between real first-cold-pressed EVOO and olive oil is the same as the difference between butter and oil. What's going on here is basically like cutting butter with oil. Yeah, you probably won't notice at 10%, but you will definitely notice at 50%.
- jcrei 11y agoFor the most part, you should avoid Italian brands of olive oil (sold outside of Italy). They mix Greek, Spanish, Portuguese olive oil, then label it Italian for branding purposes, and the content is never virgin or extra virgin. The labelling is misleading on purpose. If you can find, go with either Greek or Portuguese. Much less adulterated olive oil.
- golergka 11y agoStill, it's better than robbing, beating and killing people.
- reviseddamage 11y agoNo, it's not "still better than robbing, beating and killing people", because those are the things you would need to do in order to integrate and control every stage of the agri-food value chain.
- davidw 11y agoIt is stealing though: you're knowingly giving someone an inferior product while claiming it's something else.
- mikeash 11y agoI'll grant the last two (as long as the additives aren't toxic) but this basically is robbery, just at a distance.
- ryan606 11y agoThis was a very interesting 60 Minutes piece last night, but also very frustrating. They tested three brands of EVOO sold in the US, and found two were complete fakes, but didn't tell viewers which ones not to buy. How does this provide any actionable information to the public? At least tell us what we should be looking out for.
- sanoli 11y agoIn Brazil there are tv shows that do this kind of testing, but then they don't go on to mention the brands/companies that fail whatever it is that they test. It is indeed frustrating. What the hell is the show for, then? "Hey, some businesses are dishonest, we just found out, with footage to prove it, but sorry, we can't tell you which ones." I hate it.
- lukeschlather 11y agoThey would get sued for libel, and they would lose because these taste tests are not valid evidence in US court. I suspect the problem is somewhat overstated - to me it sounded like the tasters believed the olive oils were lower-grade, but without a rigorous definition of what that is it's hard to say how big the problem is. Personally, I buy the lower-grade EVOO for sautéing. I'm going to be disappointed if it's really just olive oil with chlorophyll added, but at the same time I'm not looking for high-grade stuff when I buy a $10 bottle of oil. It would be a waste for what I'm doing with it.
- mikeash 11y agoIn the US, isn't it up to the accuser to prove libel, not the defendant to prove that what they said was true?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI used to get good olive oil when I lived in California. A little old guy would call me on the phone once a year, and ask if I needed more Olive Oil. I would always say Yes! and order a bottle or two. Then his granddaughter would get on the line and verify my address etc. This guy owned the trees, pressed the olives and bottled it himself. It was the best stuff I ever tasted. He quit calling years ago; I miss him.
- SolveEverything 11y agoAnyone know of the best way to buy the best EVO (extra virgin olive oil)? reply
- pvaldes 11y agoThe guy parroting in the article is really annoying. In the other side, this is again a problem of uneducated consumers. People don't know currently what mean concepts like bread or milk. Seriously the real taste of milk is totally different to the watermilk/waterchalk that we drink currently. You buy cheap and by unknown brands, you'll have a cheap product. I can't talk by Italy, but in Spain this is a serious market. If some brand would be tempted to sell fake olive oil mixed with other oils as pure virgin olive oil directly to the final consumer [1] the competence, consumer's associations and the government would eat it raw in five minutes. Olive oil sold to consumers can not contain sunflower and of course not the infamous canola oil. The idea to mixing rapeseed and olive oils and selling it as pure olive oil will be outrageous in Spain. We need to remember that in 1981 more than 20.000 spaniards where poisoned by scammers selling fake canola oil. Many died and other suffered permanent nervous damage for the rest of their lives. It was a really bitter lesson and the market is strongly regulated since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spain_rapeseed_oil_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spain_rapeseed_oil_toxici... [1] Everybody can expect to have sunflower oil, palm and also canola in their favourite brand of potato chips or cookies, but is advertised as vegetable oils. You can mix olive oil with other edible oils as long as you tell the consumer what is eating and we do not joke about it; Pepsico was fined in 2003 for fake advertising with a brand of 100% olive oil fried potato chips. Other company quickly unclosed that the real content of olive oil was the 2%, brought the brand to trial and won.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoAs Italian can confirm. Some of the tastes of my youth disappeared (strawberries are nothing like old locals one you could get) but people take food labelling very, very seriously.
- galfarragem 11y agoAs rules of thumb (my grandparents used to have olive trees), I would use: pure olive oil is thicker and gets solid with the cold. The same for honey.
- SolveEverything 11y agoKnow of the best way to buy the best EVO (extra virgin olive oil)?
- patrick_99 11y agoI did an olive oil tasting at a local shop dedicated to olive oil. Unlike the grocery store olive oil I've always had, their olive oil had a bit of a burning sensation in my throat. Lots of flavour; I buy my olive oil from them now.
- p_eter_p 11y agoOlive oil is being produced in Georgia now: http://georgiaolivefarms.com/ http://georgiaolivefarms.com/ I've gone through a couple bottles and was not disappointed.
- samstave 11y agoThere was an interesting story on NPR a while back about counterfeit honey from china. http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering/ http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering/
- Blahah 11y agoMy grandfather was a chemist at GSK, and at one stage in his career was responsible for sourcing raw ingredients for many of their products (toothpaste, soft drinks, etc). One such ingredient was lemons. He used to travel regularly to Sicily where he would sit down with the local Mafia families and try to negotiate huge lemon juice contracts. They would trot out some juice and he would taste it and perform various chemical tests. His first time doing this he decided they had excellent juice and ordered all the juice they could produce that season, but when the full shipment arrived and he tested it in London he found it was fake lemon juice - water with citric acid and some other crap. So he goes back to Sicily to sit down with these families again. This time he tells them: I have authority to spend more money on lemons than anyone else in the world. I'm also a better chemist than anyone you could possibly employ. I'm buying the same amount again, but this time I'm testing every tank before it boards the ship. We get the best you've got this time, and every time in future. If anything is off, we're never buying lemons in Sicily again. He said he half expected to disappear that night, but instead the next day he got VIP treatment at the dock while he and his team tested every single tank of juice, and it was all perfect. For the rest of his career GSK got top quality lemon juice. After he died my grandmother received several letters from his contacts in Sicily, thanking him for being fair and honest. The sad thing is that it's the locals who really get fucked over in these scenarios: they fear the Mafia and their livelihoods are totally under their control.
- kafkaesq 11y agoSo GSK knowingly did business with the Sicilian Mafia? Fascinating.
- jc4321 11y agoOlea Estates EVOO from Sparta, Greece is the real deal! USDA organic certified, hand picked olives, first-pressed and cold-pressed. Extremely low acidity and all of our testing is available online. It is my husband's family farm started in 1856. Check out our early harvest Olea Gold unfiltered, strong, peppery, finishing EVOO. The highest polyphenols are in this oil. Our kalamata and tsakistes olives are also delicious! www.oleaestates.com