I did not know...

...that olive oil is regularly faked:

Slippery Business: The trade in adulterated olive oil [New Yorker] by Tom Mueller, via Flutterby

The investigators also discovered where Ribatti’s adulterated [seed+hazelnut] oil had gone: to some of the largest producers of Italian olive oil, among them Nestlé, Unilever, Bertolli, and Oleifici Fasanesi, who sold it to consumers as olive oil, and collected about twelve million dollars in E.U. subsidies intended to support the olive-oil industry. (These companies claimed that they had been swindled by Ribatti, and prosecutors were unable to prove complicity on their part.)

In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.’s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” one investigator told me.)

    1 comment(s)  

I aspire to one day having "olive oil task force" on my resume.
      ...posted by Katxena on November 11, 2008 9:08 AM

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