Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Tom Mueller

Overview

"[Mueller reveals] the brazen fraud in the olive oil industry and [teaches] readers how to sniff out the good stuff." —Dwight Garner, New York Times

For millennia, fresh olive oil has been one of life’s necessities—not just as food but also as medicine, a beauty aid, and a vital element of religious rituals. But this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt. A superbly crafted combination of cultural history and food manifesto, Extra Virginity takes us on a journey through the world of olive oil, opening our eyes to olive oil’s rich past as well as to the fierce contemporary struggle between oil fraudsters of the globalized food industry and artisan producers whose oil truly deserves the name "extra virgin."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393083484
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/08/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	225,158
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Tom Mueller’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling Extra Virginity about food fraud, and Crisis of Conscience on whistleblowers and their enemies.

Table of Contents

Prologue Essences 1

1 Olives and Lives 15

2 Oil Bosses 41

3 Olives Sacred and Profane 67

4 The Lovely Burn 89

5 Industrial Oil 111

6 Food Revolutions 131

7 New Worlds of Oil 159

Epilogue Mythologies 203

Glossary 207

Appendix Choosing Good Oil 221

Acknowledgments 231

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A Best History, Current Events, Contemporary Issues Audiobook of 2012. "[Narrator] Peter Ganim narrates with appropriate surprise, occasional outrage, and always energy and excitement. His excellent Italian and his deep base voice suit the text. His voicing of the many personalities Mueller interviews and even his reading of the glossary at the end are most entertaining...a must listen..." - SoundCommentary
"[Ganim's] voice lavishes the descriptions of beautiful landscapes of olive groves and delicious olive-oil-infused cuisine with audible love. He gives studied accents to the global range of olive oil producers, farmers, professors, and wholesalers, according to their country of origin." - AudioFile Magazine Starred review. "Engrossing history, vivid contemporary reporting, and a cogent call to action, expertly blended in an illuminating text." - Kirkus Reviews
3 out of 4 stars. "Mueller builds a convincing case...gives readers the tools to find honestly and lovingly produced product." - USA Today
"...engaging story..." - Publishers Weekly
"Extra Virginity promises a journey into the 'sublime and scandalous world of olive oil' and delivers on that promise. Readers of this book will never again look at olive oil in the same way." - New York Journal of Books
"a sparkling, stylish, sharply observed narrative that entertains and educates." - The Dallas Morning News
"Extra-virgin olive oil is glorious, complex and slippery...that's bountifully clear in Tom Mueller's expansive, fascinating exploration...Mueller manages to fuse the poetry and business of olives into a riveting tale that also sheds light on food politics more broadly. The growing legion of olive oil aficionados are destined to adore it, especially the useful index telling them how and where to buy." - Macleans
"How long have readers been waiting for a book like this? A century? A millennium? Finally, the earth's most poetic food has found its storyteller. Essential, smart, and ridiculously overdue." - Bill Buford, author of Heat

Editorial Reviews

Italy resident Mueller, who wrote a piece on olive oil for the New Yorker, is well-situated to interpose olive oil against the Byzantine ways of its present-day production in this intriguing and sumptuously researched book. He begins in southern Puglia at a small, family-run olive oil business, then examines the vastness of Italian farming and olive production and the ongoing struggle for quality oil making. His history takes readers through Europe and eventually around to California and Australia. The book’s organizing conflict centers on current imbalances between trade quality and quantity, and the problematic roles of politics, government, and regulation. Mueller includes specialists in his book from a variety of disciplines, including archeology, classics, and epidemiology. Interspersed historical material follows the oil’s thread out of Mediterranean antiquity through subsequent civilizations and imperiums, into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Mechanization during the Industrial Revolution, Mueller points out in this engaging story, accelerated production and consumption, but now the industry is plagued by questionable developments that are fortunately offset by the growing artisanal trade. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"In covering an industry that has its heroes and villains, author Tom Mueller does a splendid job of sorting out the players and demystifying the product."

Los Angeles Times - Russ Parsons

"Mueller does for his subject what Susan Orlean did for orchids."

Columbus Dispatch

"Extra Virginity may make you reconsider the extra you’re paying for 'extra.'"

Wall Street Journal - Cynthia Crossen

"Passionately written yet clear-headed…Mueller builds a convincing case for olive oil as one of the most miraculous and versatile substances in all of nature."

USA Today - Jerry Shriver

"[Extra Virginity] does for olive oil what Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation did for hamburgers. Mueller traces the history of this valuable product from antiquity to the present, but the really disturbing part is his exposé of the inferior quality control and outright fraud among today’s oil producers."

Hollywood Reporter - Andy Lewis

"Tom Mueller is, in turn, chemist, explorer, scholar and bard, infusing the narrative with a sense of wonder."

Times Literary Supplement

A Best History, Current Events, Contemporary Issues Audiobook of 2012. "[Narrator] Peter Ganim narrates with appropriate surprise, occasional outrage, and always energy and excitement. His excellent Italian and his deep base voice suit the text. His voicing of the many personalities Mueller interviews and even his reading of the glossary at the end are most entertaining...a must listen..." - SoundCommentary
"[Ganim's] voice lavishes the descriptions of beautiful landscapes of olive groves and delicious olive-oil-infused cuisine with audible love. He gives studied accents to the global range of olive oil producers, farmers, professors, and wholesalers, according to their country of origin." - AudioFile Magazine
Starred review. "Engrossing history, vivid contemporary reporting, and a cogent call to action, expertly blended in an illuminating text." - Kirkus Reviews
3 out of 4 stars. "Mueller builds a convincing case...gives readers the tools to find honestly and lovingly produced product." - USA Today
"...engaging story..." - Publishers Weekly
"Extra Virginity promises a journey into the 'sublime and scandalous world of olive oil' and delivers on that promise. Readers of this book will never again look at olive oil in the same way." - New York Journal of Books
"a sparkling, stylish, sharply observed narrative that entertains and educates." - The Dallas Morning News
"Extra-virgin olive oil is glorious, complex and slippery...that's bountifully clear in Tom Mueller's expansive, fascinating exploration...Mueller manages to fuse the poetry and business of olives into a riveting tale that also sheds light on food politics more broadly. The growing legion of olive oil aficionados are destined to adore it, especially the useful index telling them how and where to buy." - Macleans
"How long have readers been waiting for a book like this? A century? A millennium? Finally, the earth's most poetic food has found its storyteller. Essential, smart, and ridiculously overdue." - Bill Buford, author of Heat

From the Publisher

How long have readers been waiting for a book like this? A century? A millennium? Finally, the earth's most poetic food has found its storyteller. Essential, smart, and ridiculously overdue.

Bill Buford

Mueller, a freelance writer based in Italy, expands on his 2007 New Yorker article, "Slippery Business: The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil," with this in-depth look at the world of olive oil production. Skillfully blending international courtroom drama with the rich history of one of the first commodities, Mueller explains that despite its almost universal status as a symbol of peace and prosperity, olive oil has been a magnet for fraud and corruption since antiquity. While the earliest record of oil tampering dates back to 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets, the Romans devised a system that helped curtail such behavior; bottles known as amphorae were stamped or inscribed with notes at each stop on their way to the consumer. Mueller would say that such a system would be a good starting point in today's olive oil trade, where the words "Made in Italy" carry almost no assurance that anything other than the label is from that country. VERDICT Fans of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Peter Singer and Jim Mason's The Way We Eat will find Mueller's indictment of a slippery trade enlightening and entertaining.—Rosemarie Lewis, Georgetown Cty. Lib., SC

Library Journal

The subtitle of this work,“The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil,” captures the delectable, and distasteful, essence of its topic. Mueller, the world's expert on olive oil production and olive oil fraud, delves into the shocking realities of deception, product globalization, lax regulatory practices, and illegal mixology and bottling that are associated with this product. Narrator Peter Ganim presents this work in a style reminiscent of fiction. His voice lavishes the descriptions of beautiful landscapes of olive groves and delicious olive-oil-infused cuisine with audible love. He gives studied accents to the global range of olive oil producers, farmers, professors, and wholesalers, according to their country of origin. Historical context is provided, which is peppered with references and lavish quotes that still inspire olive oil makers today. A.W. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2012 - AudioFile

Expanding on his New Yorker article exposing fraud in the olive oil industry, Mueller considers the trade's past, present, and future. The author opens with an olive oil tasting, where experts identify the flavors and fragrances that distinguish high-quality oil from lampante, which can legally be sold only for fuel--except that lax enforcement by the EU has led to an epidemic of oil labeled extra virgin and/or "100 percent Italian" when in fact it is a blend of cheaper oils from other countries. In addition to the slippery (but often surprisingly engaging) rascals whose shenanigans Mueller investigated in the original article, the author visits conscientious cultivators striving to elevate standards with a combination of time-honored techniques and cutting-edge technology. Among them are the De Carlos in Puglia, historic center of Italian olive oil production; the Vaño family in Jaén, trying to improve the generally low quality of Spanish oil; and Gordon Smyth of the New Norcia monastery near Perth, innovative preserver of a tradition established by the Spanish monks who brought olive trees to Australia in 1846. Mueller consults with chemists and government officials on two continents to examine why extra virgin olive oil is so healthful and why attempts to control its adulteration have been so ineffectual. (Short answer: corruption in Italy; indifferent FDA in America.) He intersperses aromatic vignettes from the history of olive oil, which in centuries past adorned the bodies of Greek athletes, burned in lamps in Christian churches, served as a folk remedy for a plethora of ailments and set the civilized Romans apart from those barbarians who favored meat, beer and animal fat over bread, wine and oil. So, "[a]re we witnessing a renaissance in oil, or the death of an industry?" The answer is still uncertain, but lovers of fine food and fine prose will relish Mueller's exploration of the storied byways and modern sanctuaries of the olive, related with supple elegance. Engrossing history, vivid contemporary reporting and a cogent call to action, expertly blended in an illuminating text.

Kirkus Reviews