We New Zealand producers have been banging on about this to deaf ears for years. Do your own taste sample. It won't fail. I dare you. Buy a bottle of so-called extra virgin olive oil from Italy or Spain and buy one of ours.
The European oil will be rancid, pale and lifeless. It will taste like sludge. It will hang cloyingly in your throat like the end of days. There may be a European olive oil that is not rancid on sale somewhere in New Zealand but I have never found it.
The sad thing is that New Zealanders have got used to a bad product and have come to regard the ghastly taste of the European "extra virgin" olive oils sold in supermarkets as the true taste of extra virgin olive oil. It is not. Fresh New Zealand extra virgin olive oil is delicious.
I swear, I can go into any supermarket, select a European "extra virgin olive oil", whack the top off, take a slug from the bottle and I know I'll gag at its oral insult.
The heart-breaking challenge New Zealand producers have is not quality. Our oils can hold their own anywhere. The problem is price. There is no way we can compete with these Europeans. They have overwhelming critical mass. Spain, Italy and Greece as well as the North African countries have millions of hectares of olive trees.
Italy, Spain and Greece produce 75 per cent of the world's olive oil.
In 1998, the United States imported 48 million gallons of extra virgin olive oil, of which 35 million gallons came from Italy. But such is the slackness of the American labelling system that much of the oil imported as Italian actually comes from the vast, low-production-cost groves in Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco, none of which is mentioned on the label.
This not only disadvantages the honest Italian producer but sure as hell leaves the rest of us in the smaller oil producing nations with our heads numb.
The Europeans, however, have one further pernicious advantage: European farm subsidies. When I was getting into the olive oil business I read of a case that commanded European headlines at the start of the last decade. Italian police raided a big olive grove producing extra virgin olive somewhere in Italy. Out the back were container-loads of Algerian and Tunisian extra virgin olive oil which were to be bottled as locally produced Italian extra virgin olive oil.
This was bad enough. But in the farm office, police found on the computers invoices about to be sent to Brussels for €13 million ($21.6 million) of subsidies. To be fair, the Italian Government laid into the offenders and about 80 farms were confiscated. But that farm subsidy scheme is an invitation to crooks.
There are also serious concerns about the transport of the North African oil to Italy. Some olive oils, if they are olive oils at all, are pumped straight into the holds of the ships and sent across the Mediterranean in the heat of the late summer. Olive oil hates being left in heat. That's when its quality will really decline.
But when we travel to Europe and sit out among the trees in Italy or Spain with our salads and our gorgeous tomatoes, the European extra virgin olive oil, grown in Europe since the times of the ancients, is fine.
So what happens between when it's produced in Europe and when it hits the shelves in New Zealand, Australia or Shanghai, for that matter? Time. Time is what happens. The olive oil the Europeans can't consume or sell through their own markets sits around going stale until the European producers dump it nice and cheap on our shelves.
And the Food and Grocery Council, which represents the supermarkets and the overseas producers and is headed by former National MP Katherine Rich, refuses to listen. You don't have to be an expert to distinguish between a good olive oil and a bad one.
Rich refused to accept Fair Go's challenge to taste one of each the other night. She would immediately have noted the difference. She made a very bad blunder.
Her organisation is sanctioning the $30 million dollar business of selling people imported "extra virgin olive oil" that is most certainly not what it claims to be and may in fact be highly processed oil.
In doing so she and the grocers' council are seriously impeding the ability of local olive oil producers, who have invested heavily in the trees, their cultivation and the olive oil production, to make a living.
