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Article: Olive Oil - Tasting the Mediterranean
- Article from:
- Today's Woman
- Article date:
- November 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Today's Woman LLC Nov 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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THE ORIGIN OF OLIVE OIL IS ALMOST AS CURIOUS AS ITS taste. Though olives have been a staple of the Mediterranean diet for 3,000 years, their discovery remains a mystery. One must wonder how the Greeks decided that those gnarly evergreen trees stretching across the Aegean-kissed fields could produce such a useful fruit. Hanging green, and ripening to purple-black, the freshly picked olive is inedible: too bitter to consume. But humans are inventive. Someone must have studied the tiny drupe (stone fruit), soaked it in lye, squeezed it, smashed it, and discovered what we know today: Olives are 30 percent healthful edible oil. For at least 1,000 years, olive oil has been extracted by crushing ...