The Corruptibility of Olive Oil
Image courtesy of Mehmet Murat Carman.
What makes an olive oil “the best”?
I’m sat against a shelving cabinet, brimming with oils and other produce – pickled, dried, and preserved – to try and find out. The olive oil in question is manufactured by “Mr Olive Oil”, also known as Mehmet Murat Carman. He is the proprietor of this shop and sits at a desk covered in a cluster of bottles and small plastic shot glasses. His son Murat finds space on the edge of the stairs that snake up towards his apartment, his Croc Pollex clogs peeping onto the shop floor. For the next few hours, I’m lost in Carman’s fastidious tales about his groves in Cyrpus and Turkey – how their local communities work in communion to harvest the olives by climbing and shaking the trees. Carman carefully pours one shot, and then another, of black olive oil. I try them between palette cleansing swigs of pomegranate molasses, its sharpness squeezing my eyes shut with the efficacy of tequila. In his Cockney lilt, Carman recommends cupping the vial with my hands to warm the oil and then swilling it to coat my mouth. “It’ll go down a treat. You won’t know you’ve had oil.” He looks at me intently over his glasses whilst leaning forward: “What can you taste?”
The black oil tastes distinctly olivey, due to a process in which the olives are “dried under sunshine until they’ve wrinkled up like little raisins,” Carman tells me, “at which point they are boiled and then pressed.” It is the oil he grew up on and has received widespread acclaim. His oil is, as The Times describes it, “smooth, bright and fruity with a length of taste that any winemaker would kill for,” and it has been crowned “England’s best olive oil” by New York Magazine. Since visiting Carman, I’ve glugged many of his oils, one infused with lemon, and greedily chomped on vacuum-packed olives and a jar of unripe pickled almonds, bright and briney, all of which he generously gifted me despite protest.
The olive groves of LA Organic, an olive oil brand co-founded by designer Philippe Starck (image courtesy of LA Organic).
As such, I have built up a good authority to verify his oils’ delightful grassiness and glassiness, and their claims to be the best. Recently, however, I’ve heard that there is a machine that can offer an arguably greater authority on olive oil: one supposedly devoid of bias, and cognisant to the world of fakes. You could sum it up as an “AI smelling machine” and it has got me wondering: to really know such a thing as what tastes best, what human experiences must this technology inhabit? What must this kind of sentience be fed on? Perhaps, the first whiff of a freshly opened bottle, the design of the bottle it is poured from, or even a language to describe the memory it invokes?
Olive oil’s story began a long time ago, before machines were being designed to differentiate “good” from “bad”, “best” from “worst”. It is an ancient product, but one that frequently acquires contemporary inflections. In his book Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil (2011), writer Tom Mueller investigates olive oil as the most frequently counterfeited and adulterated product in the EU. It’s not hard to understand why. The olive oil industry is currently estimated to be worth $15-20bn, but olive oil’s increasing popularity as a cooking oil, super food, staple of the enviable Mediterranean lifestyle, and status as the poster child of long-life and good-skin means this number is growing. Chef Peter Hoffman, writing in his book What’s Good? A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients (2021), describes the shift from cooking with butter to olive oil in Britain as “the beginning of the decolonization of our collective culinary outlook,” opening the door “for not only the Mediterranean cuisines,” but “non-Eurocentric cuisines” too. Against this opening up, however, conservatism has crept in through the back door, as the industry tries to rewrite its narrative by doubling down on various quality checks. Chief amongst these is the question of whether an oil is “extra virgin”, which often proves to be contentious. During his research, for example, Mueller talked to a number of informants who work in the industry. One of them, who is named Marseglia, suspects that as much as 98 per cent of olive oil sold as extra virgin in Italy is, in fact, not.
Image courtesy of Mehmet Murat Carman.
“You have to remember, olive oil is essentially fresh juice,” explains Curtis Cord, editor-in-chief of Olive Oil Times and founder of the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, speaking with me over a long-distance call. As with any juice, there are multiple ways of producing it, which is where the idea of extra virgin comes in. Whether an oil is extra virgin is typically a question of whether it meets a definition set out by the International Olive Council (IOC)[1], an intergovernmental organisation that brings together producers and consumers of olive products. According to the IOC’s definition, an extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) cannot be tampered with through heat, refining or chemicals, and it should have less than 1 per cent oleic acidity (acid is a sign of decomposition). Furthermore, Cord tells me, “there should be no defects detectable through smells of rancidity, fustiness, and wine or vinegar.” And finally, an EVOO “has to have identifiably good qualities – smells of bitterness, fruitiness and pungency.”[2] For the most part, assessment of these qualities which help determine if an oil is an EVOO are certified by sensory panels, a consortium of experts who, like a pack of blood hounds, sniff out the so-called “fustiness”, “fruitiness” and subsequent goodness or badness (and therefore authenticity) of oils.
This may seem like an insanely antiquated practice for human beings to be undertaking, but olfaction is the last sense to be machine-readable because of its complexity. There are simple rules for encoding (and reproducing) colour, light and sound artificially, but smell is entirely different. Rather than having inherent odours, molecules gain their smell by virtue of the way in which they interact with the 400 olfactory receptors in our noses, which can vary immensely. Scent is processed in the frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain that also deals with our personalities and emotions; it is inextricably linked to memory and experience. This, then, explains why the compound benzaldehyde is associated with the cherry-almond sweetness of marzipan, maraschino cherries and Bakewell tart in western nations, but has the savoury taste of MSG/umami for Japanese consumers because of its commonality in various pickled condiments.
“Storytelling, for most of us, underpins our relationship with taste and scent more than anything else. The development of sensory science and AI smelling machines, then, are built on an immense ambition: they seek to find a hard-edge of flavour that is replicable, definitive and universal. ”
I think back to my time with Carman. The oil’s charm and flavour was undoubtedly heightened by the smiling man and his son in front me, all of us crowded into a small unassuming shop on a backstreet in London’s Clerkenwell, which – contrary to reason – actually specialises in electrical wares.[3] From this chilly grotto, crowded with dusty cables, sockets, and electrical fittings, I could feel the Mediterranean heat on my face through the stories I was being told. The oil was doused in the sunshine of Carman’s family farms in Cyprus and Turkey, as well as the idylism of his stories. Storytelling, for most of us, underpins our relationship with taste and scent more than anything else. The development of sensory science and AI smelling machines, then, are built on an immense ambition: they seek to find a hard-edge of flavour that is replicable, definitive and universal.
Sue Langstaff is one of world’s leading olive oil tasting experts and founder of the dedicated sense assessment company Applied Sensory. Langstaff proliferates her knowledge through manual guides known as Defect Wheels, which she has developed for olive oil, as well as wine and beer. These referential wheels help discern mustiness as smelling, Langstaff tells me, like “wet cardboard” or “vanilla ice cream that’s been left in the freezer for too long and has scum on the top”. Rancidity may come through as “muddy sediment, or manure or pig farm waste pond, or vomit,” or “you know when you go into a doughnut shop and there will be this awful, rancid smell?” Langstaff lives in California and doesn’t like using words such as “objective” and “subjective” – for her, drawing out the shared experience of smell is a matter of calibration.
“The machine cannot tell you something is rancid because it smells like Play-Doh or wood varnish, but it can be programmed to tell you the concentration of the molecules which are markers of rancidity. ”
This process starts by calibrating the very panels that judge oil. When Langstaff’s company took over an olive oil sensory panel hosted at the UC Davis research university, for instance, she immediately changed things up. “They weren’t a good group and I didn’t particularly like the way they were scoring,” she says, “so I recruited people from olive oil companies and classes I taught at UC Davis. I brought them on as apprentices for a couple of years before integrating them into the panel.” Panels such as these must include a minimum of eight sensors per session to accommodate for the inevitable variability and cross-section of findings and tastes. Langstaff’s panel has 17 people and, even though there can never be complete consensus, she claims that “a lot of them can score within tenths of one another”.
In Italy, however, the story of sensing olive oil is being developed by an entirely different vernacular, one founded in analytical instruments and compound crunching. It seeks to cut through the variability in how smells are sensed and recorded, to instead capture the objective, molecular essence of smell. The likes of electronic noses and tongues have been around for a while, but an astonishingly new and sophisticated device has recently been used within academic research, with papers referencing its first application to olive oil in 2022. This is the AI smelling machine. Chiara Cordero, a professor of food chemistry, is one of its creators, and she has found time between the classes she teaches at Turin University to tell me how it works. She speaks quickly and with astounding precision: “The AI smelling machine uses analytical chemistry to target and quantify potent key food odourants in particular foods to predict their sensory properties. Once we know the key molecular targets in food types, we can tune the sensitivity and specificity of our smelling machines to them.” The machine cannot tell you something is rancid because it smells like Play-Doh or wood varnish, but it can be programmed to tell you the concentration of the molecules which are markers of rancidity.
A machine similiar to the one used by Chiara Cordero and her fellow researchers to analyze the smell of olive oils (image courtesy of Chiara Cordero).
Scientists have already trialled the machine’s utility in measuring characteristics of hazelnuts, cocoa and olive oil, but Cordero’s colleagues are now investigating broadening its application to include roasted coffee, dairy, and essential oils. In theory, this machine will be able to predict the smell of all foods types on the prerequisite of knowing their aroma codes, which are curated in the adjacent world of molecular sensory science through something termed a “sensomic-based expert system”. By screening hundreds of samples to check every batch is compliant, it’s possible to define the smell boundaries of certain profiles. “The strength of this kind of approach is that we can focus on the compounds that are shaping the identity of a product by reference of a human panel; we can then translate these traits into a table of key odorants and related concentrations,” Codero explains. “The idea is not to replace human sensory panels, but to support them,” she assures me.
Machines like these should help bring mass order to the ineffable world of smell – a uniquely somatic and cerebral sense – and the world of olive oil. They will be able to regulate products at mass scale and could even have applications beyond the world of food, such as detecting breath that smells like freshly mown clover, a potential sign of liver failure, or sweat with a scent of freshly plucked feathers, which could be rubella. They will, the idea runs, be used to detect the quality and authenticity of products with precision and at scale, thereby combing out crime and corruption. In theory, their superhuman sensitivity could detect with such great nuance that smell actually becomes unshackled from linguistic parameters – from the stories we tell about food to explain their flavours. Where, then, does that place the need for writers like me? Taste is currently a poetics that writers crave and I’m not sure that I’m ready to retire my nose quite yet. Likewise, the calibration of flavours and smells that Langstaff and other sensory scientists strive for is a question of semantics – it relies on the co-creation of linguistic relativity in a world of epic fungibility.
“If you tell someone they’re smelling something even if it’s not there, they will smell it.”
This is a sentiment that many others working in this field would agree with. Tasha Marks, for instance, is a set designer, food historian, artist, curator, teacher, and writer, all with a focus on “sensory interpretation, sensory storytelling and creating artwork with the senses”. She tells me that taste is highly suggestible. “If you tell someone they’re smelling something even if it’s not there, they will smell it. When I’m creating exhibitions, I think a lot about how language will influence how people smell it.” She gives the example of a recent exhibition she created around tea, in which she “put words into [the accompanying texts] that aren’t actually present in the smell I’ve curated - and people smell it nonetheless.” I start to wonder whether, if taste were to have a horoscope, it would be like me: a shapeshifting and, at times, duplicitous gemini.
In support of this, Marks tells me about Sarah Hyndman, who is a master of sensory manipulation. Hyndman is the author of the book Why Fonts Matter (2016) and the founder of Type Tasting, a company that shares niche and expert knowledge on the “taste” of fonts through multisensory type workshops, events and installations. By changing the fonts on food labels, Hyndman can make yoghurt taste sweeter and chocolate seem more expensive. “It’s why a lot of people think wine tasting is a load of utter bollocks,” Marks says wryly. Packaging, then, is the real connoisseur of storytelling. Do the soft pastel landscapes that are illustrated on olive oil bottle labels accompanied by “Made in Italy” stamps make us swoon with vitality with every slug of the liquid? Does the font make our heart grow stronger, our skin more shiny?
Graza is a new olive oil brand that has become popular, in part, through the design of its squeezy platic bottles (image courtesy of Graza).
I think back to Carman’s bottles, which are highly simple in their design. They display a photograph of his parents, who are encircled by a wreath of olive leaves. Some of the larger bottles are plastic, which seem to nonchalantly nod to the consumer: “Let the oil do the talking”. Carman’s packaging gleams of honesty and humility, further emphasised by a display of the products’ lineage – “Established 1950” – and the focus on family and traditional values. The brand’s title, Murat Du Carta, is also his son’s name,[4] and is proudly emblazoned on the bottles in red. The simple confidence of the design matches that which Carman himself instils in me. With every drizzle I’m sure: this is good, life affirming oil.
Olive oil standards can differ around the world. Langstaff explains that the IOC, for example, has a lower threshold for signs of defect than olive oil bodies in the US. “They [the IOC] want to allow for heritage oils that use traditional methods of production,” Langstaff explains. “Even if that means using olives that have sat in piles, fermenting before being pressed. The US has developed higher standards because it doesn’t want to be a dumping ground for Europe’s shitty oil.” The heritage oils that she is talking about are ones guarded by the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme, which ascribes value to terroir and the history of products. Codero tells me that the AI smelling machine is so sensitive, it can go beyond establishing whether an oil is extra virgin or not: it can pinpoint the cultivar and breeding of the olives that an oil is pressed from, how ripe the olives were upon harvest, the tree’s geography, the microclimate of the soil conditions, and the technological processes that made the oil. It could, therefore, test the compliance of products to PDO certifications, or even inform strategists on how to deal with the inevitable effects of climate change on harvests, market fluctuations or geopolitical impacts on the availability of crops. If used to these ends, then the machine has formidable potential in advancing agriculture, and the food and beverage industry more broadly.
Image courtesy of Jess Stubenbord via Wikimedia Commons.
These machines, however, would still be at the mercy of those who use them, and the stories they want to tell – olive oil cannot always be extracted from its surrounding sociopolitical context. In Cyprus, for instance, during the 2018 season the olive oil brand Colive harvested fruit from both the Greek-Cypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, mixing the two to create oils that it bills as a “taste of peace” in an island marked by civil unrest, war, and displacement. While Colive positions olives as a symbol of peace and resolution, there are other regions in which the fruit is actively entangled in war.
Olives are believed to make up 25 per cent of the agricultural income of Palestinians, for example, but this has often been weaponised in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Long before the recent escalation in violence, there has been extensive documentation to show Palestinian olive groves in the West Bank being burnt by Israeli occupiers – one part of a series of illegal land grabs that have also resulted in the deaths of Palestinian farmers and the displacement of communities. In both of these contexts, olive oil is not simply a foodstuff, but also a marker of national identity – questions of food and agriculture are, among other things, always political in character. Sat within the context of market fluctuations and geopolitical impacts on the availability of crops, smelling machines will no doubt come to play a part in politics, even if their roles are invisible. Will these machines change our perception of the value of products, excluding some, but aiding the inclusion of others? A machine may be able to detect the the smoke of scorched earth in an oil, but would it tell us to care?
“If I had detected any of these supposed faults in the oils whilst the father and son shared stories of foraging wild herbs on their olive grove, would I have voiced my concern? Would I have trusted this inkling? Would I even have cared?”
Even outside of these explicitly political contexts, the value of an olive oil is directly impacted by the storytelling it is entangled in. Cord, for instance, believes that the quality of olive oil has increased enormously in the last 10 to 15 years because producers have had to find ways of increasing value: “People don’t get into olive oil to get rich because, unfortunately, it’s treated as a commodity. Supermarkets have traditionally used it as a ‘loss leader’, so we’ve come to expect it to be cheap when good oil [actually] can’t be.” He goes on to explain that “producers have found that if they make a high quality product, they can distinguish their brand on the marketplace, whether it’s by participating in international competitions like [the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition] or getting good press about their products.” Adulteration and manipulation are so easy, the crudest markers of difference are in fact heritage and status. If we don’t maintain these ideals, production will be a continual race to the bottom. The free-market breeds competition in addition to innovation: it simultaneously pushes us to define the boundaries of both ends of the spectrum. AI machines, however, have the potential to illuminate the quality and authenticity of products to consumers, which in turn might stabilise their value. But in this move towards market stasis, we run the risk of homogenising taste into easy categorisation.
Homogeneity, however, is not always seen as negative; in some product categories, it is actively sought after. Marks, for instance, tells me that she has met one of the head blenders for PG Tips tea, a person whose job is to ensure that every teabag produced tastes reassuringly identical, expertly blending Assam crops in order to reach universally appreciated uniformity. “At first we use basic language to describe things, like ‘this is bitter’, and then you start to learn information for what flavour to look for,” Marks tells me. “As we build an understanding and matching vocabulary, you begin to appreciate these things. It’s an interesting correlation between effort and appreciation.” Yet if the knowledge of PG Tips’s master blenders is, in future, inherited by machines, would this link between effort and appreciation be broken?
Image courtesy of LA Organic.
In trying Carman’s oils, I do not detect a whiff of ice cream scum or taste Play-Doh. But whilst writing this piece, imagining the thrum of a machine with an intelligence beyond my comprehension, I’ve asked myself: if I had detected any of these supposed faults in the oils whilst the father and son shared stories of foraging wild herbs on their olive grove, would I have voiced my concern? Would I have trusted this inkling? Would I even have cared? I’ve come to the conclusion that even in my most self-aggrandising moments of identifying as a food writer, I would not – a good story is a good story after all. An olive oil being sold out of the back of an electric fittings shop by nice people makes for a damn good formula, perhaps even the best one.
[1] Different regions of the world may have standards set by different bodies, but the IOC is dominant in Europe, as well as having member states in North Africa, West Asia and South America.
[2] It is worth noting that although typically seen as a marker of quality, the label of extra virgin is largely a description. Carman’s black oil, for instance, is excellent, but not extra virgin because its production method does not abide by the IOC’s definition.
[3] For those who wish to visit, the store can be found at 76 Compton St, London, EC1V 0BN.
[4] Du Carta, Carman explains, is the family’s nickname in Cyprus.
Words Lily Wakeley
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #3. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.