The superiority is purely a question of Flavor, for all olive and other table oils have the same food value.
Many factors combine to make Lucca and other Italian olive oils so pleasing to the palate. The soil is specially adapted to the cultivation of the olive tree, and care has been taken to select the best varieties. The old Roman epicures, who gathered their delicacies from all parts of the world, already preferred Italian olive oil, especially that of the variety known as the Licinian and grown in Campania.
No less important than soil and variety is the proper harvesting of the crop. In Asia, as well as in Greece and in many parts of Spain, much of the oil produced owes its inferior quality to the fact that the olives are knocked off the trees with poles or shaken off. The Italians who make the best oil pick the olives by hand and deliver them at the mills without bruises.
These same Italians subject the olives to four successive pressings. The oil from the first, known as virgin oil, is the finest, and as it is also the most expensive, unscrupulous dealers may and do sell the yield of the following and increasingly inferior pressings under that name. Eternal vigilance is everywhere the price of getting pure food and the best of it.
There is food for thought in the official information that Spain exports large amounts of olive oil to France and Italy and that the greater part of this is reëxported from those countries, largely in the form of mixed oil. In 1911 Spain exported 90,419,723 pounds of olive oil, valued at $7,397,977.
Much good has no doubt been done by the Italian Society of Permanent Chemical Inspection, for the analysis of food products and official certification of purity. The honest grower of and dealer in olive oil suffers much from the competition of the cheap oils.
In the interest of honesty a law was passed in Spain in 1892 providing that all cottonseed or rapeseed oil imported into that country must be denatured by the addition of 1-1/2 per cent. of wood tar or petroleum and also that all imported olive oil found to contain cottonseed oil or other similar products shall be rendered unfit for consumption in the same manner.
The dangerous nature of the competition to which the olive grower is exposed is illustrated by a remark made by commercial agent, Julian Brode, in the Consular and Trade Reports (August 29, 1910.) Writing from Alexandria he says: "The natives, most of whom are Mohammedans and large oil consumers, have been educated to substitute cottonseed oil for the olive oil they formerly used, and the latter is now found only in the houses of the wealthy. The change, which has taken place in Egypt, and which is now taking place to a great extent in Turkey, can likewise be made in Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, and other Mohammedan countries if proper efforts are put forth."
Bearing in mind the remarks in a preceding chapter regarding cottonseed oil the word "educated" in the above quotation is painfully sarcastic. It is purse versus palate, cheapness versus Flavor, which remains for the wealthy alone to enjoy and get the benefit of.
It is in the sardine industry, however, that olive oil is fighting its hardest battles. The oil in a box of sardines costs, if genuine, more than the fish in it. Consequently, efforts are being made to substitute cheaper oils. From regions where sardines are canned in wholesale quantities come reports of annually decreasing imports of olive oil, with a corresponding increase in the imports of cheaper oils. Were it not for the public's "prejudice" in favor of Flavor in oil, the olive would doubtless be kicked out altogether. I have read in a consular report that "cottonseed oil has been selling about fifty per cent. cheaper than the olive oil used in packing. This saving, the packers say, would be given to purchasers of their goods."