The olive oil underworld

It continues to be sold. I continue to be amazed. Pomace olive oil is what I'm talking about, in all its overpriced toxic splendour.

Pomace Poser

The fact that something has the words olive and oil written on it, but is also freakily well-priced, is naturally going to have shoppers grabbing for it.

What is surprising is that after tasting the stuff, the same shoppers are coming back for more. Perhaps many of them aren't, but clearly enough of them are to keep the Pomace machine rolling. And it's a bad machine.

The truth is that the two words olive and oil together are all but meaningless unless a few other words, namely cold pressed or extra virgin, are pretty close by (and even then, many lies have been found to have been told on labels).

So what is pomace? It's the oil made from what's left after extra virgin and virgin olive oil are made. It's concocted from the skins, pulp, seeds and stems, which by now contain so little oil that mechanical extraction isn't going to yield anything. It's a blood from stone scenario in which high heat (often at carcinogenic levels) and chemicals, such as the solvent hexane, are necessary to help things along.

Apart from this less than delicious information, it tastes pretty k*k. Well, it tastes one tiny notch above the average canola or sunflower oil. It might be cheap as olive oils go, but it is damn pricey as a cruddy seed oil replacement.

Since we're on the topic, you should actually be walking straight past all those oils too. Any oil at all which doesn't specifically state that it's cold pressed or extracted purely through mechanical means is not a foodstuff and is for external use only.

These oils, like pomace, are good only for the following: brush a tiny bit into your cat's coat for extra lustre, squeeze into door hinges to stop squeaking or, most fun of all, get someone to rub the oil into your feet. That's about it.

As mentioned above, deception is not restricted to pomace. It seems almost the entire world of olive oil is mighty greasy. Though bottles labelled E.V. or cold pressed may not be in the pomace league (flavour and smell would give that away), they are often not quite as advertised.

Corruption and fraud appear at every stage of the process (and apparently have been for centuries). The last word on the subject is the book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, by Tom Mueller (online order at around R200).

This is a foodstuff where buying local really makes sense. More about these South African oils next week.