Title: The Great Olive Oil Scam | Reader's Digest Canada
Headings: The Great Olive Oil Scam
The Great Olive Oil Scam
Content: Puglia is the world’s top region for the production of extra virgin olive oil, which is in great demand around the world. But the De Carlo family and other local farmers who produce the real thing are struggling, unable to compete on volume or price with the flood of inferior, falsely labelled oil. “People have abandoned their land,” says Grazia. “ Skills are being lost. Saverio’s family has had a mill here since 1598, and he refuses to give up. 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.