The oil became fashionable when health gurus turned it into a healthy good for a society made up of people wanting to achieve eternity. That oil was a pleasure for the palate and a good for existence, the people of the olive oil-producing countries already knew, unable to understand their gastronomy without the golden elixir twinning the ingredients of their recipes.
Oil-producing countries have had a harder and deeper existence with the terroir than those that have cooked with other ingredients, let's take butter or milk cream for example. Spain, a country of haughty olive growers, as is Italy and any oil-producing Mediterranean territory, has never seen the fruit of the olive tree as a fashion, and herein lies the care and strength with which almost all the producers and the consumers, a product of first-class nutritional quality.
The Italians have always been masters when it comes to advertising their products globally. Prosciutto is much more widespread in the world than Iberian ham, and it is almost impossible not to find olive oil made in Italy on any continent, even if they use, as has been the case, surplus production from other producing countries duly camouflaged under a label. transalpina.
Until a few years ago, Italian producers bought oil produced in Tarragona and sold it on the world market as Italian oil. And that truth has already surpassed the comfort of the zone of lies.
Many years ago, at the time when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher began to impose neoliberalism on the world, I lived for a few months in London and, except in specialized stores, it was difficult to find olive oil. If you were lucky enough to discover a liter bottle on the shelves, it was Italian and usually worth the money that products aimed at cosmopolitan minorities are worth.
And in those London days, I lived in the house of Mrs. Frazier, a woman who offered rooms to students in exchange for a few pounds a month. Mrs. Frazier was a working-class Thatcherite Scot, but she took good care of us and she had a very special appreciation for me, an 18-year-old kid. One of the gifts he gave me was to buy a bottle of olive oil so I could prepare a potato omelet for him and I made it for him. I have done better and I am sorry, in memoriam, for my dear lound lady.
Mrs. Frazier died and the most traditional potato omelette, onion, always onion, can be consumed in several restaurants in London.
Since the eighties, that decade so whitened by the melancholic irredentists who comb their gray hair, olive oil has won great battles in a global market in which it has to compete with other vegetable and animal (dairy) oils and give its best against other inclemencies also shaped by man. I am referring to geopolitical and climate disasters.
Since the end of the pandemic, the price of a liter of oil has risen almost 75%. High quality oil is as expensive as moderately priced oil, basically due to the purchasing power that one or the other can consume. And the rise in prices will continue to increase until the final judgment in which we will end up losing all the consumers and producers of a very essential food if there is no one who decides to intervene.
If the blame for the chaotic situation that the olive oil market is experiencing is the Ukrainian War, climate change or producers interested in saving surpluses from past years to determine immediate prices, they will have to find a solution. Because, as the duly tuned phrase says: they all killed him, and he himself died.
