Italian Olive Oil: Not Always "Made in Italy"

What Happens When Demand Outweighs Supply

There are a couple of products that -- at least from my point of view as an ex-pat living in Italy -- are "thoroughly" Italian: mozzarella cheese...wine...and olive oil. I can take most everything else in this country with a grain of salt, but those three products -- well -- how could they be any thing BUT Italian-made?

Silly me. What the heck was I thinking?

According to an article in the 7 May edition of the Italian daily La Reppublica (www.larepubblica.it) a just-introduced law for countries in the European Union (EU) insists that products are labeled identifying where they are REALLY from.

Well duh - that's a no-brainer, because if the label says "Made in Italy" than that's obviously where the product was made. Right?

Think again.

The La Repubblica article points out that large olive oil brands, such as Filippo Berio and Bertolli -- which have long cultivated the image that its oil comes from rustic, rolling groves in the Italian countryside -- had to admit recently that their olive oil often arrives in Italy via tanker trucks from destinations as diverse as Tunisia, Turkey, Greece and Spain.

Say it ain't so!

According to an article in the Wednesday edition of the London Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk), current EU laws stipulate that foreign olive oil can be sold as Italian olive oil if it is cut with a small amount of the domestic product.

Only four per cent of olive oil being exported out of Italy is pure Italian oil.

Actually though, the new EU law is a good thing. Because new labeling laws let you know what you're actually buying. For example -- according to the Telegraph -- with the law change, every bottle of Italian olive oil will have to declare which farm it comes from, and the press that extracted the oil. In the case of blended oils, a precise breakdown of the various oils will be listed.

What has come to light is that even though Italy is famous for its olive oil, it is the second largest producer in Europe behind Spain. The awful truth is that Italy cannot even produce enough oil to satisfy its domestic customers. Last year, the crop was down 13 per cent to 700,000 tons, while Italians used 835,000 tons.