Title: The Great Olive Oil Scam | Reader's Digest Canada
Headings: The Great Olive Oil Scam
The Great Olive Oil Scam
Content: Olives are our history and our passion, so we make sacrifices and we carry on.” Europe consumes 1.85 million tonnes of olive oil a year. But after a disastrous 2014 olive harvest, extra virgin oil became scarcer than ever in Italy and the production and distribution of mislabelled oil quadrupled to maintain supply, according to Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming lobby group. Cheap olive oil from Tunisia, Morocco, Spain and Greece is often simply relabelled as Italian. Such oil may not come from Italian groves but it is at least made from olives. Some counterfeit olive oil has been found to contain everything from canola and hazelnut to soybean oil, colored with chlorophyll. “Extra virgin” is frequently the cheaper “virgin” oil, bulked up with olive pomace oil (extracted from old olive pulp, using solvents), doctored, deodorized and flavoured with beta-carotene. Antonio Barile is a national executive at the CIA, the Italian Farmers Confederation. “ If you consider Italy produces an average of 400,000 tonnes of extra virgin a year,” he says, “but sells 900,000 to 1 million tonnes of Italian extra virgin, you see the scale of the fraud.” 2 / 3
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