“‘Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,’ one investigator told me,” wrote Tom Mueller in the New Yorker in 2007. Was he talking about white slavery? Bad-debt mortgage loans?
Nope, he was talking about the black market in bogus olive oil. It turns out the world is full of so-called olive oil that’s actually many other oils instead, from hazelnut to a low-grade oil that the Italians call lampante, or lamp oil; and the Italian olive oil you buy may originally be from Spain and merely bottled in Italy.
That’s the kind of thing that burns up Theo Stephan, owner of Global Gardens, whose store is aptly located in Los Olivos. Or, more accurately, such imposters burn up the oil, which is why olive oil got a bad buzz, especially thanks to a TV celebrity “chef” who will go nameless, as something you shouldn’t cook with, and instead just drizzle onto foods while serving. “Olive oils cut with other oils smoke, so they don’t taste good,” Stephan explains, “but you can even deep fry with real olive oil. You can even save your oil and reuse it five times without losing the good qualities like the polyphenols.”