This is a non-review of a book that I haven’t read: Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. (And, I suppose, a review of an oil that I just bought.) I heard about the book on NPR last Friday (and now cannot find the show), as they were interviewing the author, Tom Mueller. I learned that, for 30 years, the olive oil that I bought because I thought it was full of good anti-oxidants was not. It took me two full days to get the joke. The author still hasn’t; he has devoted a website to “extra virginity:” www.extravirginity.com.
The day after I heard the show, I found some apparently virgin olive oil in Wal-Mart, under the brand “California Olive Ranch.” It is in a green bottle. It is not green oil. Its ingredient list says: “100% unrefined, unfiltered extra virgin olive oil. Contains no trans-fatty acids or genetically modified ingredients.” Its label reads like the makers read the above book, which means that they don’t get the joke either. But it smells like the fresh juice of ripe olives, not oil, just as the author told us olive oil is supposed to smell like. I’d never smelled that wonderful aroma in my life, but I knew it when I smelled it. My housemate said it smells like an olive grove.
I had always considered “extra virgin” to be a meaningless marketing ploy, trying to put a superlative on an absolute. One is either virgin or not; one cannot be more virgin than someone else, or excessively virgin, which is what “extra virgin” would seem to mean.
I forgot several things: that every word on a food label means something; that its meaning is actionable; that these are large companies with lawyers who parse the meaning of words. And that, when used to modify an absolute, “extra” has a different meaning: “outside of,” as in “extra-marital,” “extra-territorial,” or “extra-terrestrial.” “Extra virgin,” even without the hyphen, modifies an absolute to say that it is not virgin, outside of virgin, past virgin. It may have once been virgin, but it will never be virgin again.
Thus, the other words on olive oil labels that the author thinks are meaningless or redundancies are not. It may say “cold pressed” because “extra virgin” makes no such claim. In fact, it makes no claim except that the oil is not virgin. “Virgin” oil is always cold pressed or centrifugally extracted, a distinction without a difference in the finished product; “extra virgin” has to say that it is.
For thirty years, I bought the cheapest virgin or “extra virgin” olive oil on the shelf because I didn’t think too hard about the words “extra virgin.” Turns out that I was contributing to the problem of low-quality olive oil, made from dropped fruit instead of fruit picked at the peak of ripeness. It makes a nasty, rancid oil that has to be deodorized and refined; the makers then add a bit of virgin olive oil to give it some color and flavor.
I use olive oil for my health; I’m not buying cheap olive oil any more. Now I wish the maker of my oil to drop the “extra” from their label and be proudly virgin.