Olive

Inedible without curing

Fresh-picked olives are almost inedible — bitter, astringent, and unpalatable due to a compound called oleuropein. The flavor is so unpleasant that even animals tend to avoid raw olives on the tree.

The traditional curing methods — brining, water-curing, lye-curing, dry-salt-curing, fermentation — all serve to leach out or break down the oleuropein over weeks or months. Each method produces a distinct olive style:

• Greek-style brining — Kalamata, briny tang
• Sicilian salt-curing — Castelvetrano, mild and grassy
• Lye-curing — Spanish Manzanilla, soft and salty
• Greek-style oil-cured — black, intense, slightly chewy

Olive oil — civilization’s first culinary oil

Olives are pressed into the world’s oldest culinary oil — predating most other cooking fats by millennia. Mediterranean civilizations used olive oil for cooking, lighting, religious ceremony, anointing rulers, and trading currency.

Modern olive oil grades:

• Extra virgin — first cold pressing, best quality, most expensive
• Virgin — still cold pressed, slightly higher acidity
• Pure / refined — chemically processed, milder flavor
• Pomace — extracted from leftover paste, lowest grade

A bottle of high-quality extra virgin olive oil is one of the few foods that has changed least over thousands of years.

Olive trees outlive empires

Olive trees can live thousands of years — there are documented olive trees in Greece, Israel, and Italy estimated at 2,000+ years old. The trees are nearly fireproof, drought-tolerant, and recover from severe pruning.

A famous olive tree in Crete (the “Olive Tree of Vouves”) is estimated at 3,000-5,000 years old and still produces fruit annually. Mature olive trees are often passed down through families and bought as living heirloom property.

A bumper-and-bust crop

Olive trees produce in alternate-year cycles — heavy harvest one year, light the next. This biannual pattern challenges commercial planning and pricing, with global olive oil prices varying significantly between heavy and light years.

The 2022-2024 droughts in Spain and Italy caused a major olive oil shortage and price spike worldwide, demonstrating the crop’s climate vulnerability.