ShareThisExcerpts from an interview with Dan Flynn, executive director of the year-old University of California-Davis Olive Center, which is partially funded by oil made from the trees on campus.
Q: Why has it taken so long for Americans to get on the olive-oil wagon?
A: Olive oil has not been a part of our culture -- large parts of the United States are more into vegetable oils and butter. But consumption has been growing pretty rapidly for the past 25 years or so.
Q: How rapid is "rapidly"?
A: Just to put it into perspective, the average Greek person will consume 24 liters of olive oil a year while the average American consumes about three-fourths of a liter a year -- about the size of a wine bottle. I would expect that's different in California, where we consume more because of the Mediterranean influence on our food.
But now we're consuming 10 times per capita what we did 25 years ago. And even with our low per-capita consumption, we're the fourth-largest consumer of olive oil in the world -- that's based on sheer volume, so we're just behind Spain, Italy and Greece.
Q: Why should we care what grade of olive oil we're eating? Is there a big difference?
A: Yes, there is. What most people are used to in the United States frankly is the flavor of defective olive oil. One way to look at it is when an olive oil has defects, it means either the fruit was defective before it was milled or it's been stored improperly -- and so you're tasting the flavor of spoiled food.
Q: What should we look for when buying olive oil?
A: Freshness is No. 1. Olive oil doesn't get better with age. So look at the date on the bottle and see if there's an expiration date.
Q: How do you know when an olive oil has gone bad?
A: You have to taste it. Rancidity is the key factor -- rancidity occurs when oxygen interacts with the oil.
Q: What makes olive oil unique?
A: If you do a search in the Bible or even the Quran, you would see olive oil pop out a lot -- it has a long, long history. ... It's one of the few oils that's made simply by grinding the fruit and extracting the oil without any solvents or heat, which is the way most seed oils are produced. Most vegetable or seed oil is refined comparatively to how crude oil that goes into your car is refined.
Q: We keep hearing about the health benefits of olive oil. What are they?
A: Olive oil is high in monounsaturated fat, which has been correlated with improved cardiovascular health. It also lowers bad cholesterol, and I believe is the only oil associated with that kind of effect. It also has a lot of antioxidants associated with fighting cancer.
(Gina Kim can be reached at gkim(at)sacbee.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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