FOOD SPECIAL..... OLIVE OIL

OLIVE OIL Virgin TERRITORY    Kasimpasha in Istanbul is just down the hill from the fashionable Taksim and Galata areas, but it feels quite different. It is a tough, working class neighbourhood, whose most famous son is Turkey's strong willed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Like Erdogan, many of its inhabitants are originally from the Black Sea coast and this is why on Sundays farmers from there drive down to Istanbul to sell their produce at Inebolu Pazari (Inebolu is a Black Sea town and Pazari is the same word as our Bazaar).     This is a proper farmer's market, not fancy at all, just a line of stalls in a grimy car park. On a recent visit there I found no one who spoke English, so I could only gesture, hold out cash and hope for the best. But any doubts faded when I saw the produce: milky fresh cheeses, flatbreads sprinkled with sesame and filled with Swiss chard, piles of freshly harvested walnuts with none of the rancid, bitter taste they often have here, and the biggest mushrooms I have ever seen.     Amid all this I almost missed the old man at the edge of the market. He had a few big jars of olives, like the wrinkled kuru sele ones which are dry cured in rock salt yet, surprisingly, are not intensely salty. I bought a few packets and then noticed some bottles of murky green olive oil. Usually I avoid buying liquids on trips abroad due to the weight of glass bottles and their tendency to leak in transit, but this was in plastic bottles that were light and well sealed, and it was just 10 Turkish liras per litre (about Rs310) so I added a bottle to my already heavy shopping bag.     It was only in Mumbai that I opened and tasted the oil — and slapped myself for not buying more. It was not the strongest tasting olive oil I have tasted. In Puglia, in southern Italy, at a family-run oil company I have seen olives being crushed and the green juice dribbling out had a peppery note and hot taste in the throat. This Turkish oil was milder, but with an unmistakable green note that developed in the mouth, still soft, but aromatic and somehow making your palate tingle with its bright taste.     Dipping bread into it made you realise its voluptuous texture and as you swallowed the combination of bread and oil was so elementally good that you felt yourself smiling from the sheer pleasure. The taste lingered in your mouth, commanding you to soak another piece of bread and eat. In the larger world of premium olive oils this farmer's unnamed oil might not seem unusual, but for me it was a reminder of something I had almost forgotten — how good olive oil can be despite the efforts of the olive oil trade.     These efforts are very visible these days. Even kirana stores now have shelves full of imported olive oil and in supermarkets they stack up in gleaming golden walls. It seems to be a far cry from the days when you only got small cans of olive oil in chemists shops for medical use, and yet in some ways little has changed. All this olive oil is still selling itself on health benefits, with taste an almost irrelevant factor. When this olive oil boom began some years back, one brand tried to sell on taste, importing oil made from specific varieties of olives like picual and arbequina. But this seems to have stopped, perhaps with the company realising that much more money could be made simply by climbing the health bandwagon.     And who can blame them? Having the sort of health benefits that are claimed for olive oil might seem to be the dream for any product. Yet olive oil also illustrates how this can rebound — the intense focus on health has made people forget, even never realise, how good olive oil can taste. No olive oil I have bought and tasted in India, often at considerable expense, has ever given me a sensation like that oil from Istanbul. In India lip service is paid to olive oil's suitability for Western food, but move from lip to the tongue and they all taste the same. All that is really expected from olive oil in India is some mysterious benediction of good health that can unblock our arteries and restore us to youth and beauty.     A little thought would indicate that it is unlikely any oil will do this. And when you start engaging with the claimed health benefits of olive oil — and then the health benefits claimed by other oils, like rice bran or safflower — the more confused you get. Claims contradict each other, studies seem to have been done in isolation of larger concerns, proper comparisons are not made, selective use is made of data and, above all, most of the studies seem to be paid for by organisations that just happen to be promoting the oil that the studies end up endorsing. This is not a medical column so I am not going to comment on the scientific validity of any of these studies. All I can note is that common sense suggests that if health is such an issue, then you should be reducing your fat intake, whatever the source, to the point where the amount you eat, for example in the tadka used to flavour dal, is so low that it makes little difference to your health. At that point you can take it in any fat you like or which suits your cooking style, whether its olive oil or sesame oil or mustard oil or ghee or whatever else. Where olive oil in India moves from the apparently medical to something even more questionable is with olive pomace oil. This is what is produced from the residue of skins and seeds left after pressing olive oil. Tom Mueller, in Extra-Virginity, his eye-opening book on the olive oil trade, describes the process. The olive detritus is washed, dried and drenched in an industrial solvent called hexane. This is heated to evaporate the hexane, leaving a black liquid that requires "desolventization, deacidification, deodorization, degumming.... The resulting clear, odourless, tasteless fat is blended with a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to give it flavour, and is sold as 'olive pomace oil.'" Olive pomace oil cannot legally be called olive oil and many people in the olive oil business recoil at the idea of eating it. In Tuscany I met the head of an olive oil co-operative who told me proudly that he was 57 years old and olive pomace oil had never crossed his lips. One term for it in Italy is lampante, which means to be used for lighting lamps and another major use is in making soaps. But it isn't quite correct to say, as I admit I once did, that it is never used for edible purposes. Mueller, when I checked with him, said that it used as a general purpose fat in things like mass-market pizza bases or deep-fried snacks — essentially uses where you would never think about the kind of oil used. You would never think that in India, given how olive pomace oil is being promoted. It is being sold as a highly desirable product in itself, more suitable than olive oil for Indian food. When challenged — for example on online olive oil websites, where the promotion of pomace oil is viewed with great disquiet — Indian importers say that they make it clear that olive pomace oil is not olive oil. But they still stock it high next to the olive oil brands and the 'more suitable for India' claim seems to carry the implicit selling point that olive pomace oil retains many of the benefits of olive oil. As a mollifying argument to international olive oil people, the Indian importers suggest that pomace oil will be the route to greater consumption of olive oil in India.     If these Indian importers defend pomace oil ferociously abroad, they are even more aggressive in India. The day after I wrote about pomace oil not being used for edible purposes abroad I got a call from one importer who pointed out the mistake — without admitting that few people abroad would specifically seek out olive pomace oil to use — and adding, just by the way, how close he was to senior people in my company. These senior people, when I checked, told me to ignore him, but it made me curious about what made the pomace people so passionate. (Other Indian food writers tell me they have also faced such pressure).     The reason isn't hard to find. If you go online you can find supermarkets abroad, like UK's Asda selling a three litre bottle of olive pomace oil for £6.37, which converts down to a rate of Rs210 per litre. Keep in mind this is the retail price, so the bulk rates which the importers will get it is far lower. A bottle of olive pomace oil sells in India for around Rs400. I can get a bottle of organic cold press (meaning, no use of chemical solvents, just pure oil from a traditional oil mill) sesame oil for the same price. Selling olive pomace oil in India seems to be an incredibly profitable business. (In fairness, some pomace oil is now available for around Rs280 a litre; perhaps even the importers are getting embarrassed).     There is nothing wrong in making a profit, of course. If consumers want to ignore the health concerns raised over pomace oil, the periodic bans placed on it by some countries and the poor conditions under which it is produced (Mueller describes "ancient furnaces caked with charred, toxic-looking organic material...") and pour money into the pockets of the pomace people, that is entirely their right — though perhaps the Finance Minister should take notice and take a fair share in the next Budget.     My real concern is the way olive pomace oil, and the generally poor tasting olive oils (many of which Mueller says are also adulterated with pomace oil) being sold in this country for their claimed health benefits, are making us forget what a wonderful tasting product olive oil can be. I certainly had until I encountered it once again with that old farmer in an Istanbul car park.

Vikram Doctor CDET131108