Have you noticed something weird happening in the olive oil aisle of your local
supermarket? Over the past few years, has the proportion of oil graded "extra
virgin" gone up substantially, even as the price of that oil has come down
substantially? It certainly feels that way to me, and a quick trip to Amazon
turns up one
gallon of cold pressed Italian extra virgin olive oil selling for $19.99,
or $5.28 per liter.
Enter Tom Mueller of the New Yorker, who in one of those classic
New Yorker stories uncovers the
shady world of fake olive oil. Not only is Tunisian olive oil being sold
as Italian, it seems, but even soy-bean oil and hazelnut oil have been pressed
into service, so to speak, and passed off as extra virgin olive oil.
I do love this story, but being a counterfeiting statistics monomaniac, I also
have to take Mueller to task for this:
In February, 2005, the N.A.S. Carabinieri broke up a criminal ring operating
in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand litres of
fake olive oil, with a street value of six million euros (about eight million
dollars).
The "street value" of this stuff, it seems, was 60 euros a liter,
or $82.60 at current exchange rates. Every wine retailing for less than $60
a bottle is cheaper than that. It certainly seems that the value of the seized
olive oil was exaggerated, quite literally, by an entire order of magnitude.
Which is, I’m sad to say, more or less par for the course when it comes to
counterfeiting statistics.