Comstock's magazine 1119 - November 2019 | Page 37

2008 led to an estimated 300,000 infants
and young children becoming ill and six
reported deaths. And at least 20 people
died in Costa Rica this year from drink-
ing adulterated alcohol. Those are only
a fraction of the cases from around the
world.
After more than four decades as a
James Beard Award-winning food writer,
cooking teacher and cookbook author,
Sacramento resident Elaine Corn can
suss out sleights of hand around food.
Corn wrote about the widespread adul-
teration of extra-virgin olive oils (a scan-
dal exposed in 2007 by The New Yorker)
in The Sacramento Bee, Capital Public
Radio, NPR and other major news outlets.
Her reporting helped inspire the olive oil
industry and California to adopt new
standards for product quality in 2014.
While better standards and more
consumer information were definitely
good things, Corn says the deceptions
that sparked them can destroy consum-
er confidence in the food system. “One of
the backlash consequences of the revela-
tions about extra-virgin olive oil is that
people became afraid to buy it,” she says.
“They were all thinking they were going
to get ripped off.”
Few California industries are as fo-
cused on policing their own products
as olive oil, perhaps due to the negative
media attention over the past decade.
And it gets a big hand from Selina Wang,
research director at the UC Davis Olive
Center, where, among many things, she
has helped to establish the authenticity
standards by which California olive oil is
now judged.
The problem with olive oil, Wang
says, is that there is a fine line between
something intentionally altered and
something unintentionally mishandled
into becoming a different product than
advertised. A seminal report by UC Davis
researchers published in 2010 brought at-
tention to issues related to olive oil quali-
ty. Wang says while much of the attention
focused on the finding that 69 percent of
the olive oil tested did not meet U.S. De-
partment of Agriculture standards for
being extra-virgin, reporters and con-
sumers skipped over the most likely rea-
son: oxidation.
“A lot of the news stories essentially
said the olive oil you’re buying is fake,”
Wang says. “But what the report actually
says is that many of these imported oils
were probably oxidized by the time they
were consumed. That’s very different
from something being fake.”
Ph.D. candidate Hilary Green prepares a sam-
ple to measure oil oxidation at the UC Davis
Olive Center.
“We are a major agricultural producer, and we have
to protect our products, and we have to protect our
farmers. And we have to protect California products
from being wrongly accused of being involved in food
fraud somewhere else in the world.”
Moshe Rosenberg, food science and technology professor, UC Davis
Wang points out that extra-virgin ol-
ive oil eventually oxidizes with age, ren-
dering it no longer true extra-virgin oil.
As she sees it, extra-virgin olive oil mis-
takenly placed on a shelf for too long — or
up high where heat can negatively affect
it — isn’t the same as intentionally sell-
ing a product diluted with cheap soy oils
November 2019 | comstocksmag.com
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