When I was a young child, I would spend the summers with my widowed grandmother in Collins, a small Mississippi town. It was still making the transition from rural farms to small town. As a result, the streets were unpaved and many of our neighbors, and us, still had an outhouse in the back yard.
What most impressed me about my grandmother, in addition to her many gifts, was her sweetness. She could make you smile just by sending you a gift. And, she did.
There were no designer clothes, no trendy hair colors. She wore a loose fitting overall that, at the back, reached the floor. She wore glasses, but only when she went out for dinner or took them with her to the movies.
A few things you might have noticed, and have already taken note of are, that she always wore a hat. There is no getting around that. When she came home, she always put them on.
The first several years of my grandmother’s memory, I don’t know what she ate. She ate as much as she could get her hands on, and it was usually fresh produce.
Surviving World War II was hard on the olives. She and her family tried to survive on the little fruit and vegetables that they could grow in the country, which, up to that time, was just about all they could do.
When they were able to get outside again, and plant those excellent tender olives, they felt quite alive. They enjoyed feeling young again, and finding and picking olives that were at their peak of health and beautiful.
For example, my grandmother was one of the few who grew olives.
They were always harvested when they were green. They never ripened. When ripe they were still in the ground, but easy to pick.
One morning my grandmother was able to hear pounding from her husband’s scissors, but couldn’t tell why. She looked up, and there it was, a cluster of green olives, waiting to be sorted. She picked one, took a little of it home and placed it on her night stand.
She was happy, happy to have a daily supply of olives.
So, one day, my grandmother asked me to help her pick some olives.
“You can’t leave,” she said. “You work for six hours a day. I need to make sure those olives are picked green. They are supposed to be picked red, to show the redness of the soil.”
Thinking about it, made me smile.
“Yes, butlera,” I said.
She started to think about it.
“Yes, I know,” she said.
She went to the kitchen and came back with the two greatest Spanish she had ever seen.
She cut the membranes with the shemostache while she ran to the bathroom. After she got back, she stood at the Counter and asked me to help myself to the olives.
You may be thinking right now, that’s a lot of work for just one olives. But you see, when you harvest the olives, you don’t just pick them so they’re ready to be shipped off. You’ve got to make sure they’re free from insects, and they’re picked at the peak of their ripeness. The green olives are packed in layers of olive wood, and are pressed to produce the oil that is going to be the basis of your Italian olive oil.
So, what’s so special about olive oil that makes it very different from other oils?
Well, for one thing it’s true that olive oil should not be heated above 150 degrees c, which is the boiling point of water. This is the reason that the French and Italians have been drinking oils that are a lot lower in calories than most people in the western world. Another thing is that it’s true that the olive tree is grown in the Mediterranean, and it matures the fullness of the olive all the way through the year. The Greeks and the Turks harvest the olives at the beginning of the year, while the Romans and the Etruscans wait until August.
The wood that comes from the olive tree is made into fuel for the ancients, and is a powerful aphrodisiac. To live up to the title, “the green drink” is not from the olives, but from the wood that is crushed or convert into smoke. The smoke rises to the top because of the age of the tree, and often determines the colour of the final product. The Greeks and the Romans didn’t have to worry about heat, and so naturally their oils were much lighter in colour.
It’s said that oil can make you fat, but when tested it turned out to be the other way around. The title is actually about something called “free radicals”.
About The Author
Helena Eater
How much does the quality of food really matter? If you eat food that tastes good, your life will be better. If you eat food that tastes bad, your life will be worse. The difference between good and evil is partly subjective: what tastes good to me might taste bad to you. The difference is also partly objective: what restaurants I think serve good food might serve lousy food to you. But if we stick to objective measures — measures such as how much weight people gain or lose — we can cut through some of the subjectivity.
