Olive Oil: Mother Nature's Gift

Olive oil is one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts to humanity. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the NUMBER ONE OIL, right here, right now. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do Do Do do? Do you like that? Huh oh,
I never get tired of the trumpet fair of Josh Clark.
That's right. So that means that there's a new announcement
for a new show. Uh. Fans in San Francisco and
the Bay Area in general and northern California should not
be surprised that we are coming back to s F

(00:22):
Sketch Fest for what is this four years in a row,
easily for if not five. Yes, it is one of
our favorites. It is the premier comedy festival in the
country in my opinion, and we are always super happy
that our buddy Janet Barney invites us back. Yep. So
on Thursday, January sevent Chuck, we are going to be

(00:44):
doing a stuff you should know live show at the Castro, right,
that is correct. And the next day on Friday, we're
both doing our own thing too, so you can see
Josh and Chuck and then Josh and Chuck. Yeah. Actually
I think I'm on Saturday, but yeah, okay, Well mine's
on the eighteenth on Friday, and I'm doing an End

(01:04):
of the World live show where you can come here
and we talk about the end of the world and
all the reasons we should try to not let that happen.
It should be pretty cool, that's right. And I'll be
doing my second ever live movie Crush with very special
live guest, Busy Phillips, and we'll be talking about the great,
great Noah bomboch classic film Kicking and Screaming, one of
my favorite movies. Awesome. So you can get all the

(01:26):
information you need and tickets by going to the s
F Sketch Fest website. Uh and they will have schedules, tickets,
all that jazz, and we will eventually have links up
I'm sure on s Y s K Live and we
will see you San Francisco in January. Tickets go on
sale tomorrow. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how

(01:47):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant's Jerry over there,
and this is Stuff you Should Know, the flowing podcast
of all time. Pretty great. You're getting good at those,

(02:12):
Oh man, you'd think after ten years i'd actually be decent. Adam,
you're getting good, getting sharp ten years, Chuck, good lord,
going on eleven dude, Yeah, you know, yep, it's true.
Eventually it will be eleven, that's right, and then twelve
and then pretty much of infinity after that. I would

(02:34):
guess when you say, I feel like we're almost daring
each other to keep going at this point. You know. Yeah,
instead of doing that, Chuck, instead of just going on
like this, let's do alive oil instead. Yeah. Man, it's
kind of cool that ten and a half years in
you can still look around the world and say, or

(02:58):
looking our pantry for that matter, sure and say, man,
olive oil. That's topic up next. Those little cinnamon candy
toppings that you put on cakes. It's after olive oil. Obviously,
it's just intuitive. But Chuck, I think you should announced
everybody who wrote this article for us. Yeah, the Grabster.

(03:20):
We've we've been lucky enough to uh to get the
Grabster to kind of pump out more articles for us
here in the near future. Yep, we just Grabster. That's right.
It's super great because the Grabster does really good research
and gives us good stuff. So we are basing this
one on a Grabster article, which is just phenomenal. It's
been a while, yeah, man, so, um so there's a

(03:42):
lot of pressure on Ed during this entire um episode,
I guess is what we're trying to say. I think
he nailed it. This is very thorough. It is yeah,
he's he's good like that man, And it is um.
It's so thorough, in fact, that I think we should
just go ahead and start at the beginning, the very beginning,
which is basically where Ed started it. He fast forwarded
a little past the the um the cooling of the earth,

(04:08):
but then picks up where um where olives actually started.
And apparently, in a two thousand and thirteen study of
um chlora blast no chlora plast um, d NA jeans
in olives. Apparently that is a part of an alive that,
like from tree to tree along a lineage, the d

(04:30):
NA gets passed along, so you can actually trace the
lineage of trees. Some researchers traced the lineage of olives
domesticated olives all the way back about six to eight
thousand years ago, somewhere around the border between Turkey and Syria.
That is where the first person said, Hey, I kind

(04:51):
of like the cut of your jib wild olives, but
I think I can make you a little better. Let
me harness you and force you into domestication. Here you
go into the ground between what will eventually be Syria
and Turkey. Yeah, and that's like you were saying, just
when people caught on two, you know, like domesticating a
wild animal. But wild olives they've been around as long

(05:15):
as olive trees have been around, and olive trees have
been around, Like there's evidence that you know, fossilized pollen
and evidence that shows that took Took and all all
his gang we're eating olives, right, Yeah, they were eating olives,
and then so were their bird friends were eating olives too,
and wild olives are, like, I think, a little more bitter,

(05:37):
and they're smaller, which is why that that early um
horticulturists that I can do better. I'm a human being.
I basically owned this planet, so I'm gonna make this
olive tree do what I wanted to. And they did.
They olives grew bigger and less bitter. I don't want
to say sweeter because that's not quite quite the right word,
but it's just less bitter, more edible, and over time

(06:01):
they they've resulted in something like seven hundred different cultivars,
which a cultivars um with olives or with any plant,
it's a. It's a version of the same species, but
it has different characteristics. Yeah, because of the human hand.
The human hand. Excuse me. So when we got involved

(06:22):
and we said, hey, let's domesticate this stuff, we did
so because of those reasons. Um, maybe we want different
kinds of olive us. Maybe we want to scale this
thing and have an olive grove and get a higher yield.
Maybe you want them bigger and fatter, Maybe we want
them less bitter. So depending on who was growing them
and domesticating them. Uh, it really kind of varied on

(06:45):
what kind of all of you were going to get.
But the point is there were lots of different kinds
of and still many many different kinds of olives. Would
you say, seven hundred seven hundred cultivars from what I saw, Yeah,
and they're all just a little bit different from their
little buddy next to them. Yeah. At some point somebody said, oh,
I'd love to see an orange all of No one's
ever done an orange all before, and they just got

(07:06):
to work doing that, and now we have Actually I
don't think that exists, but that's a pretty good example
of what could have happened had somebody a thousand years
ago said I want to see what an orange all
of looks like. We would have an orange alive cultivar.
That's right, But that's it. I mean, it's just basically
difference in size shape also the size of the tree,
the shape of the tree, all all of trees. Remembering

(07:28):
our pando Um episode, how could I forget? Man, that's
a good one. I love pando as well, Chuck Um.
But we were talking about long lived trees. Alive trees
are like pretty long lived themselves. There's a couple they're
supposed to be two thousand years old. And I saw
one called the olive tree of vuvess on Crete and

(07:50):
it's thought to be three thousand years old, and it's
one it's it's just a perfect tree. Have you seen it? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
because Creedeas was the seat. Crete was the seat. That's
what it says on all the t shirts olive seat.
Right back in the day during the Bronze Age, I
believe um create was like the seat of olive oil

(08:11):
production for the world. And there's a temple at Nos Sos.
I think that's how you say it right in the
case Island. Yeah, yeah, it's not Canosis, okay um That
temple is thought to have housed I guess at any
given times sixteen thousand gallons of olive oil at any
at any point, like you could walk in there and
you would find about sixteen thousand gallons in clay amphory. Yeah.

(08:35):
As and as far as the tree goes, like you said,
they can't. They generally are very old, they grow very slowly, UM,
and like you said, they can range in size. It's
it's pretty uncommon to have super tall ones because we
have domesticated them to be a little bit easier to cultivate,
which means smaller and shorter summer like shrubs sometimes uh

(08:57):
as far as North America and South America. They are
not native to our lands, although um they do grow
because Europeans brought them over. So now the United States,
in Mexico, h Chile, Argentina and Australia successfully produce olive
oil outside of the UM. Obviously the Mediterranean region which

(09:17):
is still I think Tunisia, Italy and Spain or are
the people who are really pumping that stuff out right
the leaders for sure. And the reason I mentioned our
bird friends UM is because olives actually spread really easily.
Birds I guess eat the olives poop the seeds out,
which I feel bad for a bird because all of
pits are fairly big, you know sure, I mean if

(09:43):
you were I wouldn't want to poop out in all
of pit I can imagine if I were a tiny
little bird, that'd be a big ordeal. But that's how
all of trees like spread And since they thrive actually
in fairly semi arid conditions like too much waters not
good for him. They can survive cold snaps pretty well. Uh,
they spread pretty easily, and they can be grown all

(10:06):
over the place, not just in the Mediterranean. Yeah. And
ed h, I love how he put it here, like basically,
don't take me or anyone else to task about all
these dates because domestication of the olive tree and the
and the beginnings of olive oil could have started in
different places around the world at different times. Um. And

(10:28):
he said, basically, it's not important to try and like
nail down a specific date and region because it is conflicting.
And what's important is is that the olive and the
olive oil industry. Uh. Well, I guess it's an industry now,
but back then it was just called olive oil. Um.
It was super important. It wasn't just it's not just oil,

(10:52):
you know, it was important to religion and culture and
really had a had a big impact on these ancient empires. Yeah,
makes the point to say, like this, this region that
produced like the world's three major religions, or two of them,
at least three of them, three of the four, the
big four. I'm going with that now, the Big five Man, Jewish, Christian, Islamic,

(11:17):
and scientology, right, the Big four. Okay, let me just
say that it produced three of the world's major religions
also some of the great great earliest cultures. Um, they
all came about in this place where olives and then
olive oil production was pretty pretty widespread and plentiful. And

(11:38):
he doesn't go so far as to say like one
necessarily influenced the other, but they were definitely intertwined. And
it's it's you can make the case, like you know,
they didn't say, um, you know, chicken eggs are for
the gods or something like that, al of o is.
It's special in its own strange way to human culture,

(11:58):
especially the earliest, um, faint famous contours of human culture. Yeah,
and so important that even the word oh I l
just for all the oils is derived from the Latin
word for olive oil, specifically oleum, So you could, you know,
you could even say that olive oil is sort of

(12:18):
the the o g the original oil, right, And it's
like Popeye's girlfriend would be olive olive oil, that's right?
Or which is or just color oleum? For surely that
was his pet name for Uh. Should we take a break?
I think so, we're starting to get a little charged up.
Might as well defuse it, and all right, we'll be

(12:39):
back to talk about how olive oil played apart in
all this culture and mythology. Let's all right, Chuck. So,
as I mentioned oiler alert, um, Christianity is one of

(13:03):
the world's big three religions, and olive oil makes an
appearance in it. Did you know that I did? Um, well,
olives do at least? Yeah, and Ed actually over delivered here,
I think, oh ye, yeah, I agree, he was. He
was kind of showing his stuff. He got excited. But
what we'll go through some of these um. Obviously, in

(13:24):
the Book of Genesis, if anyone's ever heard the story
of Noah, after the flooding, Noah sends out that dove
and says, hey, dude, go out there and see what's what,
what we have in store for us, what's alive, what's dead?
And give me a report. And the dove said, sure thing, Noah,
and flew away and came back with an olive branch.

(13:45):
So it might sound like someone's under delivering, Mr Dove,
but what that meant was is there's life out there
because the olive tree is growing and everyone loves olives.
Right there you go. That was the implication. Chuck. You're
basically a biblical scholar at this point pretty much. But

(14:08):
I mean, think about the dove carrying the olive branch,
like that's almost worldwide. Somebody can point to that and
be like, yeah, that's that's a good feeling. Is what
that symbolized. We all know what that means. That means
there's a fight coming, right or somebody doesn't want to
fight anymore. So here's here's an olive branch that I
taped to a dove and I'm throwing it at you.

(14:28):
What else? Um Oh. One of the things that struck
me was that olive oil wasn't always used as um food.
It was used as definitely as an offering to the gods.
It was portioned out very exactly and precisely, and we
actually have um tablets with linear B writing for the
Messenian culture that show that it was um taking very seriously.

(14:52):
It was like you get this little quarter ouns of
olive oil. You get this quarter ouns of olive oil,
sign your name here to say you got your olive
oil kind of thing, and then part of it even
goes to the gods, right right, Yeah, that's yeah exactly,
and they have to sign for it, they do zeus um.
But then it was also used in bathing culture as well. Yeah,

(15:14):
I mean Emily has olive oil and her soap, right, Okay,
so this was a little less soapy than that. This
is a little more straightforward wherein you would take I
believe this was the Greeks, right or the Romans? Uh,
what's the difference? Now? It was in Athens. Okay. So
the ancient Athenians would use all of oil that was

(15:35):
infused with like an herb or something like that and
pour it on their body and then use a stick
called the sturgil to scrape it off, and that was bathing.
Part of bathing, I should say, I just made so
many Italians and Greeks mad because you said this is
the same thing. Well, I mean, it's to be fair.

(15:56):
Rome definitely modeled its culture almost exclusively classical grease. So
come on, I was just joking though. Sure they know that.
Give it, give him. I was just choking into like
a stereotypical Italian accent. That'll complete it. He's just a joke,
you know, perfect man. So Uh, of course ancient Egypt

(16:17):
was involved. Um, it feels like anytime you're talking about
some great you know, from olive oil to peanut butter,
well not peanut butter, you can go find it on
the walls of the tombs of ancient Egypt. Uh. And
of course the Romans just like it's either the Roman
Empire or the Chinese or the ones who are gonna
make advances by leaps and bounds. And in terms of

(16:39):
olive oil, it was the Roman Empire who was like
really got those agricultural techniques down pat for kind of
scaling it on, you know, as far as their scale goes. Plus,
they were the first ones to really spread olive oil
production beyond the Mediterranean and I think the Middle East. Um,
because the Roman Empire spread so far and because olive

(17:02):
oil is such an integral part of that culture. They
took olive oil basically everywhere with them, and olive oil
cultivation or production, all of cultivation and olive oil production
went far and wide because of the Romans. And again,
one of the reasons why they were able to spread
the stuff far and by is because alive trees grow
pretty well and all sorts of different climates. As long

(17:24):
as they're not over watered, they're gonna do okay. They
like bright sunlight. They're hardy, evergreen shrub like trees. Um though,
you can get more all lives by by watering them,
um more than just neglecting them, But you don't want
to over fertilize them. From what I understand, there's like

(17:46):
a lot of they're really low maintenance fruit bearing trees
from what I can tell, But yes, they're there. You
step up the fertilizer, you step up the water if
you want to like do commercial alive oil production. But
if you just have like an olive tree at home
and you're just growing it for fun, it's you can
go out of town for a while and not have
to worry about your olive tree. Gina, who's into this,

(18:09):
uh big time. Uh, Chad Crowley, he's into growing olives. Well,
he's into olive oil and like to the point where
like his retirement job might be olive oil, like olive
farming and growing and cultivating. Does he grow olives? No,
but he's he's into it, like doing a degree that

(18:29):
I didn't fully understand until I talked to him about
It's really cool. We should tell everybody, all the millions
of people listening who don't know who Check Crowley is.
He directed? Um that our TV show Stuff. You should
know the TV show. He was the director, producer. He
had a lot to do with it, and that scarred
him so much that he just wants to go live
on an olive farm. It's pretty much right. So the

(18:51):
fruit of the olive tree is the olive, and they
they ripen to black, purple, sometimes a little red. Um.
If you see a green olive, that means it's not
ripe yet. I did not know that, did you know?
Because I hate olives? Yeah, that's right. I was kind
of hoping that I had like imagined that, But I

(19:11):
don't like olives. That's crazy, man, I love olives. A
lot of people don't like olives, dude, that's crazy. Whatever,
they're crazy. They're crazy. They're crazy, all of you crazy. Know,
it's called personal taste that we respect. I guess, remember,
I guess I keep forgetting when it comes to olives. Yeah,

(19:32):
so as uh, the the oil in the olive um
increases as it ripens, so you want them. It's kind
of a a very tight line that you walk as
an olive farmer because you want these things to ripen
as much as possible to get the most oil. But
if they overripen and then just start falling off the tree,

(19:55):
they're no good. You gotta pick it off the tree.
So like winemakers, it's a very stressful thing to watch
that crop, I can imagine, and it comes down to
sometimes the day or the hour of the day to
really maximize your yield. Yeah, because if you think about it,
you know, you have an olive tree with a bunch
of olives growing on it. You have to time the

(20:16):
the ripening of those olives not under ripe, not over ripe,
but also not every olive on that tree is going
to ripen simultaneously, so so you not only do you
have to time it so that they're right, but the
maximum number of olives on that tree are right at
any given period too. But up beet. That is super
stressful farming, way more stressful than corn farming. Corn basically

(20:40):
grows itself. You just sit around in your easy chair
and say, hurry up, corn, getting your your basket. Yeah,
and then it just farts it off the tree right
onto your plate the stalk and does a little bow
and says how do you do? And you just clap
from your easy chairs. And I love corn trees so

(21:00):
uh some. I mean, if you have a small farm
and you're like an old, old family business, and in Italy,
let's say, you might still be hand picking these things,
which is great. But big major operations they have what
they called shaker machines and they drive through the farm
and shake the tree. Have you ever seen one of

(21:22):
those things? Yeah? And shaker machines are I mean, it's
not just specific to olive trees. They use them for
all sorts of fruiting trees. They just they just shake it.
They do. It's like the trees like and it's like okay,
that's over. It's it's kind of interesting to see. And
then like there's a I guess a catch that catches
the stuff falling off the tree and then it shoots

(21:42):
it up a conveyor belt over into like a truck
driving beside it. There you go, you just harvested a
bunch of olives. Boom. But that's a that's like a
commercial thing. That's a commercial Oh yeah operation. Right, Like
if you have if you're like a mom and pop
operation like you were saying, or if you're you're harvesting
from very very old trees, you would not use one

(22:03):
of those machines. Yeah, you wouldn't want to go to
a thousand year old olive tree and and introduce it
to the shaker machine. Mean, that would be so mean.
It's like I've seen empires rise and fall, and now
some jerk has got a new haul and shaker machine
running that runs on diesel. Yeah, thanks Todd. So flavor

(22:25):
of an olive oil is going to depend on a
lot of things. And and olive oil and wine they
grow in similar regions a lot of times, and they
have a lot of similarities, which is why often when
you'll go to wine country, there'll be a wine shop
that also sells olive oil, or an olive oil store
that also sells wine. And you start to wonder where
where's the line? Dude? You me and I went to

(22:48):
Calistoga in either Sonoma or Napa, I cannot remember. I
think it's Napa. And it's absolutely true. It's there's like
they're they're almost one and the same as just go
from a wine shop too, an olive oil shop, but
they're just it's the most amazing olive oil you've ever
tasted in your life. That's the best I want. So
it just to be clear, you hate all of us,

(23:09):
but you like olive oil, and I understand they're totally different.
Oh yeah, I love olive oil. Okay, So have you
have you gone to olive oil shops and just done
like little shots of olive oil? Dozens and dozens? Aren't
they just amazing? Yeah? Man, I like the grassy kind.
I like the nutty kind. But it's and I think
I've told you this before, really good olive oil can

(23:32):
really give me like a chemical burn on my throat.
So it has to have like kind of a buttery
quality to it, I guess for me to really like it. Yeah,
and this is the kind of olive oil that you
don't you're not like even cooking with necessarily, you're you're
drizzling it on your salad, or you're dipping your bread
in it and stuff like that, or you're injecting it
for its anti inflammatory properties. Hold on, okay, we'll get there,

(23:56):
all right. But that flavor, like I was say, and
like wine or the grapes that make wine, is affected
by the soil that you grow it in the climate,
how much rain it got that you know, the general
tar war, it really can change the the end product
of that olive and thus that that oil that you're

(24:16):
going to get. And you know, the old school oil
oiled people, olive oil experts, let's say, they'll say that,
you know, if you really want a great olive oil,
you won't even find it on some big mass farm.
It's like you can find it the best stuff on
like just an olive tree that's growing somewhere in Italy

(24:39):
on somebody's property, right that wasn't necessarily raised for that purpose,
and it's growing alongside other kinds of trees, uh, and
not like smashed together against a bunch of other olive trees,
which is basically permaculture, is what he's describing. Yeah, I guess,
so you know, we remember the permaculture up where it's
like you grow crops with around other trees and other types.

(25:02):
Just a bunch of different types of plants together produce
better crops. But over there they just say it's Italy, right, man,
They're gonna they're gonna really be happy with this one.
So UM. Apparently they also hybridized to um, which explains
how we've gotten seven hundred different cultivars of of um

(25:24):
domesticated all of plants. You just take a tree that
that does one thing really well, like produces big fat
orange olives, and you take another tree that um does
really well in a closet, and you graft them together,
and now you have a tree you can keep in
the closet that produces big fat orange olives. And it's

(25:44):
the biggest freak of nature olive tree anyone's ever seen.
Pretty amazing, So, Chuck, I think we've kind of beat
around the bush, as it were, tree long enough. Let's
talk about how you actually make olive oil. It's pretty
cool they because it's so easy in in practice. Like uh,

(26:05):
as that points out, it's a stone fruit. It's a
droope like a plumber, a peach where you have that
pair of carp that flesh on the outside and then
that hard seed right in the middle that you were
talking about that a bird's anus cannot handle. But unlike
those other kinds of like say, stone fruit, you don't
get the oil from the seed. There's some in there.

(26:28):
You can get some in from from there, but it's
really hard to do. Um. What makes olive oil different
from other kinds of fruit oils or vegetable oils in general,
is that it doesn't come from the seed. The oil
comes from the actual all of itself, which I guess
that's what I would have thought, but I didn't realize
that most of the most of the oil we get

(26:48):
comes from seeds, although it makes total sense because some
flower oil doesn't come from like the flower petals, it
comes from the seeds. Yeah, But olive oil is different.
It stands kind of on its own in that way
that you get the oil from the all of the
part of the all of you eat the fruit. That's right.
And in the process of getting that oil is starting startlingly,

(27:10):
startlingly old fashion simple. Uh. You you mash that olive uh,
we'll call it the flesh or the pair of carp
You mash that into a paste, You press that paste
to get the oil, and then you clean it up.
You get it. There's a little bit of solids and
a little bit of water left over, and you and
you remove that. Um. What has changed over the years

(27:33):
is how we do that, because back in the day,
you know, they would use stone wheels. Um. Like when
you see like a donkey walking in a circle attached
to a contraption, just hating life. Hating life, that's what
that donkeys doing. It's rolling a big wheel in a
circular path over and over all day long, smashing these
olives into a pulp. That pulp is called a pomis uh.

(27:57):
And then finally in the twentieth century they started using
things like steel drum grinders or and this one would
surprise me, um hammers mechanized hammers, which is not a
good idea now it's not. It probably seemed like a
good idea in the fifties when they introduced it. And
now they're like, this is this makes terrible olive oil.
And somebody said, I know we'll do. We'll just sell

(28:18):
it for really cheap in the supermarket. And they said genius. Yes,
because the friction, right, because heat, heat is no good.
That's why they call it cold pressed, like good stuff
is cold pressed. Heat is no good for olive oil.
It makes it, Uh, it just changes the changes the taste.
It does very much. So it introduces tastes you don't want.
It can also paradoxically get rid of tastes you do want,

(28:39):
so you it's it's not good at all to introduce heat.
And that's another reason why olive oil kind of stands
on its own as far as vegetable oils go. With
just about every other oil you you cook with, like
a vegetable oil or seed oil, it's um, it's it's
heat is necessary to get the oil out of the seat.

(29:00):
With olive oil, you don't use heat, and so it
preserves a lot of the flavors that you lose with
other vegetable oils, which is why so many vegetable oils
just taste exactly the same. It's like because did this
all just come from the same vat where if you
take a sip of olive oil, you know that's olive oil.
There's no mistaking whatsoever. Yeah, you don't want to take

(29:21):
a sip of like just standard vegetable oil. You you
you don't want to, but you can't well, I'm sure
you could, but they're not gonna put that on your
plate with balsamic vinegart or restaurant with a little pepper
grind on top. It depends on the restaurant. You think, Yeah,
I could see it. So the grinding process, you have

(29:41):
to do this long enough so the malaxation process emerges,
and from what I gather, that's when actual oil is
released from these cells and then they start to combine
with one another until it's like recognizable oil. Is that
about right? Yeah, Like tiny tiny little particle droplets start

(30:04):
to combine into larger, fat droplets of oil, and you
just get more oil out of the the the actual
all of itself, right, And that's that's just to get
the pulp, pomasy pulp mhmm, you're exactly called pomas, it's
not pomisy, yeah, p O M A C E. Right. Yeah,
But that's not the actual pressing of the oil that

(30:25):
comes next, right, that's just the crushing of it to
loosen things up to kind of get the party started.
The pressing is number two. So the pomise or the
paste is put in. Traditionally it's put onto matt or
um like like wooden boards that have holes all over
it and then stacked. So you put like say, a

(30:48):
matt down, put some of that pomise on top of it,
put another mat down, put some more pomas on top,
and then you've got a nice little stack going. And
then you get a board, and then you go get um,
you know, Giuseppe the human giant to lay on top
of the board and pressed down. Get the largest human
in the village to sit on it, right, and then
that actually you're pressing the oil from the pal mess

(31:12):
and all that oil is collected, and buddy, you've got
the first hints of olive oil. And you could actually
stop right there. And some people do. Yeah, today, of
course they. I mean the first thing you started doing
was hydraulic presses because Giuseppe was busy. There weren't enough
Giseppe's to go around, I guess. But today a centrifuge,

(31:33):
which I didn't know uh was, is used, which is
makes perfect sense because you get a centrifuge spinning and
it's gonna sling all that pulp to the outside, and
you know, the oil is gonna gonna separate and leave
that pulp behind and there's no heat whatsoever. They still
call it cold pressing even though it's not even being pressed,

(31:55):
which is interesting. Yeah, I guess that's true. I hadn't
thought about that. Like, they don't call it cold spun
olive oil. They could, I guess, right, but they still
call it cold press. So when you see it on
the bottle, that's what that means. There's been no heat
or chemical processes to make that oil that you're about
to delight in. It's all strictly mechanical and and it

(32:16):
doesn't take long with the centrifuges. It's like it happens
in minutes. Yeah, almost disappointingly, like you're like, oh, it's ready.
I wasn't gonna wait for a little while. Um So,
So after that first press, whether it's um whether it's
with the centrifuge, or whether it's actually pressed, you have
olive oil technically right there. But there's usually a second

(32:39):
step involved, because you know, most olive oil is very
clear and see through and beautiful, maybe with a little
bit of a green into it, most likely some sort
of kind of golden color. But there's another step to
get to that part. It's it's just basically a filtration step,
and for many many many years, several thousand years, I
would guess they based really just set the olive oil

(33:01):
out to sit and filter on its own, to let
the the water particles that were suspended in there, and
any little bits of solid matter from the olives leftover
that we're still kind of floating around. They would eventually
settle down to the bottom as sediment, and then everything
on top was pure filtered olive oils called decantation, and
it took like four to ten months to get to

(33:23):
that point, depending on the type of al of use. Right,
so if you want to mass market olive oil, you
can't wait four to ten months. I'm sure plenty of
people do. But you pay for that. That's the really
really expensive stuff that you're getting. What they figured out
is you can use the centrifuge again and you can
filter out the particular matter in the suspended water, and

(33:47):
now you have fully filtered, decanted olive oil that's ready
for market. That's right. Then you've still got this, uh,
this pulp left over, this stuff that you've extract of
the oil, but there's still a little bit of oil
in there, and they want to use everything. So this
is when they actually use his heat they use heat

(34:07):
in a chemical process to get every single bit of
that oil out. Uh. And that oil is not something
you want to you want to ingest. That's called uh lampanta, right,
and that is like fuel oil. Um. And I love
that head always puts in there in the industry. If
you call someone else's olive oil lampante, that's like that's

(34:29):
a what Ed calls a sick burn, Right, It's you're
saying that they're olive oil is inedible, it's only good
to be used for fuel oil. Yeah, man, that's that's
pretty rough. Really, it's I think so too. Just sippy
would he would smash if he heard you call us
olive oil just sip to smash. So you want to
take a break and then come back and talk about

(34:51):
whether olive oil is healthy or not? Yes, and yes
it is, alright, chuck. So everybody knows olive oil is
healthy unless you've read articles that say that it's not healthy.

(35:13):
It's just it's like, there's very few things that that
demonstrate terrible science slash nutritional reporting than olive oil. It's
all just very sensationalist. Yeah, here's the deal. Olive oil
is is a much better alternative than most other oils.

(35:35):
It is a monosaturated fat, which is always better than
a saturated fat. It will reduce your LDL cholesterol, which
is the bad stuff. And so if you're replacing other
oils with olive oil, they will say things in studies like, um,
you have a reduced rate of cancer or cardiovascular disease

(35:57):
or inflammation. Yeah, it will help reduce inflammation, which we
talk a lot about. Has vitamin E and vitamin K
and all those things are good for you. But it's
like that that can't be good enough to the writers
of health books and newspaper articles or web articles, because
they championed as this miracle oil that will make you

(36:21):
live forever and lose weight all at the same time.
And that's not the case, right, And it really kind
of ascended in the modern West in the nineties thanks
to the Mediterranean diet, which is basically like, look at
the Italians. Look at how much postity eat and they're
all skinny and healthy and they live forever. What's going
on over there? There's a lot going on over there,
is the answer. There is, but a lot of people

(36:42):
settled on, you know, olive oil is the key. It's
the magic potion as it were. Right, Um, it's not.
It's it's good for you. But it's good for you
in the sense that if you're eating something and you're
going to be using like vegetable oil, canola oil, and
you're replace it with all of oil, you've made a
very good decision. If you sit around and just eat

(37:04):
olive oil by the tablespoon all day long, that's bad
for you. That's that's that's too much of a good thing.
It's more olive oil is really good standing for stuff
that's far, far less healthy than olive oil is. Yeah,
And like, uh, if you're on the Mediterranean diet and
you say and look into those Italians, you know, they're

(37:26):
eating fish, and they're drinking red wine, and they're eating
lots of fiber, and they're walking up and down the
steepest hills on planet Earth, and they're strolling the shores
of Lake Cuomo and have a great family structure, like
low stress, like all these things combined. It's not like
they shouldn't even call it the Mediterranean diet. They should

(37:46):
call it being Mediterranean, right, you know. And you can't
be from Atlanta and slurpe down to malive oil and
then pretend you're from the shores of La Cuomo right now,
where's that bag of port crack lens? Exactly? So it
is healthy, but just don't we can't over or it
shouldn't be overstated how healthy it is. Right. But on

(38:08):
the other hand, there have been studies that say, no, no, no,
not only is olive oil not healthy, it's actually bad
for you. Those have not been borne out in follow
up studies, but the basis of those, that whole line
of thinking was that when you apply heat to olive
oil e g. Cook it or i E. Cook it,

(38:28):
I'm sorry everyone who loves latin um, that that you're
actually creating toxic compounds in the olive oil, so you're
actually hurting yourself. That apparently is not the case that
that the amount of heat that we apply to olive
oil to cook isn't enough to actually build up toxic compounds.

(38:49):
And if anything, olive oils um smoke point is high
enough higher than other kinds of vegetable oils that it
actually um is less likely to build up any kind
of toxic compounds through cooking. So the jury is still out,
as it is on just about everything we understand about nutrition.
But from what we can understand, olive oil is not

(39:11):
actually bad for you. Okay, it's not a super it's
not going to it's not going to give you lasting life.
But it's also probably not going to bring you to
an early grave either. Yeah, Okay, that's a good way
putting it, thanks man. So, uh, when it comes to
rating olive oil, because you go to the grocery store

(39:32):
these days, and and there is a wide wide range
of olive oils you can buy, and this is just
in your in your everyday supermarket. Like I'll get some
of that good stuff there to cook with. But Emily
and I have a store in Buckhead. We go to
this lady that we know that makes her own olive oils,
and that's where we get our good stuff. Where uh, jeez,

(39:55):
haven't been in a while, and I think she moved locations,
but it's somewhere in Buckhead. There's one indicator to writing
downtown the Cator, a great olive oil store where you
can taste, you know, shots and stuff. Is that chair
Heads And yeah it probably. But the different grades, uh,
they all have to do with the level of refinement.
And in this case, the less refined the better because

(40:18):
that refining process is what we talked about that we'll
strip away that flavor over time. So extra virgin is
unrefined olive oil. It's cold pressed, never heated, no chemicals. Uh.
Sometimes you can find bottles that say first cold press,
which means they didn't just keep pressing it, they just
had the one single press. That is the good stuff.

(40:41):
And we'll get to whether or I can trust this
in a minute. But that's the top quality. Yeah, and
apparently the highest top quality extra virgin olive oil is
actually unfiltered. It doesn't go through that second step to
remove the um water suspended in a little particular matter.
It's unfilled altered. Extra virgin olive oil is as far

(41:03):
as health is concerned, if it is a healthy product,
this is this is the bestows the greatest health benefits
and supposedly is the tastiest. That's right. Then there's virgin
olive oil, which apparently I've never seen in real life. Um,
it's apparently very very rare, but it's it's unrefined. But

(41:23):
not as high quality is extra virgin olive oil. Maybe
it's just what's the point so people don't even make
it right? I don't know, And then there's straight up
olive oil. If you've ever picked up a bottle of
olive oil, like saying the supermarket and been like, it's
a great price on olive oil, and you're looking all

(41:43):
over the label, turning it and you can't quite find
where it says extra virgin anywhere, and it just says
olive oil. What you have is all it's that's the
great of it, olive oil or pure olive oil. And
it's been bleached and I has been added to it.
It's been heated, filtered, smacked around, um, just treated very

(42:07):
very poorly, and then ended up on your grocery store
shehelf for nothing. You can use that on your bicycle chain. Yeah,
there you go, and that's about it. Or if you
go to a terrible restaurant and they ran out of
canola oil, they might use this kind of olive oil
for your for your little plate with some bread. Uh,
then you have light olive oil. This is more refined

(42:27):
even um, basically no flavor. Uh. And we should mention
though that that standard olive oil. Sometimes they do mix
in a little extra virgin to give it a little
flavor and try and charge a dollar nineteen. Yes, but
they probably call it extra virgin olive oil. Yeah. Well again,
we'll get there. Don't believe the hype everybody. Um, but

(42:49):
the light olive oil basically has no flavor. Uh, and
it it is not lighter in calories. So that's it's
somewhat misleading. That's a big deal because you would think
that if somebody sees a bottle of light olive oil,
I would think like, oh, it's good. It's diet olive oil.
It says weighs less, right, he say, um, apparently, And
here we start to get so there's also palmise olive oil, which, um,

(43:12):
that's lamponte is. It's not for eating, it's for burning basically. Yeah.
And then organic, like with a lot of organic things, Um,
there there's no standard enforcement enforcement body for organic in
the case of olive oil. So maybe it is, maybe
it didn't, but there's definitely you shouldn't bank on that.

(43:33):
But that kind of opens the door to this controversy
in the olive oil world, like where if somebody somebody
can slap organic on their olive oil bottle and charge
you more for it, but there's no way for you
to verify that it is organic. There's nobody watching things
like that, even though there's the International Olive Oil Council
and the now the North American Olive Oil Association, and

(43:56):
both of them are the standard bearers for the olive
oil industry, but they're just not big enough, and I
guess their teeth aren't quite sharp enough to regulate this
giant industry that's really boomed since the dyeties. So there's
nobody with the ability to actually make sure that the

(44:16):
olive oil that's being sold to say, like the purest
extra virgin olive oil, actually is extra virgin olive oil,
or is even olive oil at all. It could just
be like plain old vegetable oil that has nothing to
do with with olive oil and never has with just
a little bit of um extra virgin olive oil mixed
in for taste. Yeah, because I mean they use they

(44:39):
have standards, they have like actual standards for the number
of chemicals, uh minimums and maximums and stuff like that,
But it really comes down to human tasters, people that
actually taste this stuff and say, no, this is metallic
or muddy, there's no way this is extra virgin olive oil.
Fail or fuss d That's another one. I love that word.

(45:04):
But there just aren't enough mouths on these UH in
these associations to keep up with the massive, massive industry
that is olive oil industry. And so the most pessimistic
UH people out there will say of the olive oils
that say extra virgin are not right, And that's again

(45:29):
the most pessimistic. But I mean, let's just say it's fifty.
That's terrible. Yeah, it really is, because I mean, and
it's terrible for a couple of reasons. One, you're getting
ripped off. I mean, you might be paying for olive
oil that is just not up to snuff and it's
not as good as you think it is. That's that's
bad enough. But if you're you're getting olive oil because

(45:50):
you want to be healthier, right, and it turns out
that it's not only good, not good olive oil, it's
not even olive oil. You're not getting those health benefits.
You may even be eating something more than you should
and it's actually just vegetable oil, which is actually not
good for you in any way, shape or form. Really, Um,

(46:11):
that's that's just bad. So you're getting ripped off and
you're you're being abused health wise. Yeah, and it's uh.
I mean, we kind of made fun of the bottle
that says extra virgin olive oil, but you can get
the four dollar bottle and that could be fake. It's
not just the little cheap e's. I mean, that's a

(46:32):
pretty good warning sign. But you would think that if
you paid, like, you know that for the fifteen dollar
bottle next to the seven dollar bottle, that that's the
real deal. And that's not always the case either, really, bs,
I know, and I didn't run across like how you
how you can be sure? But I don't know, man,
I think there is no way to be sure. I

(46:52):
bet do a little research on your own, find out about,
you know, get a few brands that you know are
doing the right thing, and seek those out. And I
want to say, like, well, if you go to you know, Sonoma, Nappa,
you know, Provalance or somewhere where they they know what
they're talking about with olive oil, you'd have to have

(47:13):
like pretty like iron cones to open up an all
like a high end olive oil shop and sell vegetable oil.
So surely that'd be a good place to do it.
But then remember there was that whole mass Brother's chocolate
thing where they were just selling like melted down Hershey's
to everybody for like eight bucks a bar, and everybody
went for that. So I don't know. I would guess

(47:34):
you would have to befriend and olive oil producer who
you knew and trusted, maybe let them hold some of
your money for a little while, see what they did
with it. Uh, and then when they gave it all
back a couple of years down the road, then you
could confidently start buying olive oil from them. And that's
the only way, or just U we'll maybe we'll throw

(47:54):
chat a little seed money, okay, and partner with them,
and then we'll just have our own supply. He's a
trustworthy guy for sure. Yeah, Okay, cool, there we go wrong? Nice? Uh?
And then the final thing we got to talk about.
And again I think ED did a thorough job. But
I feel like we could do like three or four
more shows on olive oil. Why not, But we're not

(48:14):
going to. Okay, But the final thing here is olive
oil is great. We all love it. It's it's the
best oil to me aside from sesame oil, which also
love um, but it is it is not great for
the environment. The mass production of olive oil has some
pretty big drawbacks to it. Yes, I had no idea

(48:39):
about this. Yeah, and it made me like, go oh man,
I knew it was a catch. Always something's always something. Um. So,
when you produce olive oil, that that stuff that you
press all the oil out of the leftover olives. That's
called alive cake. And apparently one of the things that's
left over from this stuff our feet alls, which polyphenols

(49:02):
are actually kind of good for you. Phenols can be toxic,
they can be irritants, they can be really bad for
you if you ingust them orally. And when you make
olive oil, you have all this left over all of cake,
and when you spread it out there in the fields
to just kind of get rid of it, it runs
off and contaminates the local water supply. Um the water

(49:22):
that's used to create olive oil. It uses a ton
of water, and the wastewater can actually be treated in
typical municipal wastewater plants because it's too toxic. Again, this
does not mean that you're olive oil is toxic. It's
the stuff left over or that comes from the production
of olive oil that can be toxic to two people

(49:43):
and bad for the environment. So yeah, there's like a
big environmental impact, especially in small um rural areas where
like the whole local economy depends on olive oil. They
don't have the means to dispose of the stuff properly
UM where it has the real environmental impact. But it's
bad for for everybody. Just because it doesn't impact you

(50:05):
over here where you're enjoying the olive oil doesn't mean
you're not also still responsible for the impact that's going
on halfway across the world where the olive oil is
being produced. You know, isn't it amazing that they can
treat human poop waste water but not olive oil wastewater.
It is we can put a man on the moon
who can poop up there and we can treat that,

(50:26):
but we can't treat olive oil wastewater. The good news
is is as we speed into the future, UM, there
are new methods of reducing the amount of waste uh,
And there are new methods of detoxification for that waste
to be a little less harmful UH. And they're looking
at other things that they can do to help put
some of that waste actual use UM, like as fuel

(50:49):
or you know, stuff like that. So I mean they're
they're trying to get it under control, but it is
a black eye for sure. They are feeding as much
as they can to just Seppi, who's just ingesting it
and metabolizing this stuff. But he can only eat so much,
poor Giseppe. Uh you got anything else? No, Although I
have a feeling if I traveled through southern Italy somebody

(51:12):
would grab me at some point and say, come on,
sit up on the sit on the olives. Will you'd
be the Giuseppe standard. Well a second, if you tour
southern Italy, bring me back some olive oil, will you? Okay? Okay? Um? Well,
if you want to know more about olive oil, you can't.
There's nothing more to know because Egg covered it all

(51:33):
for us. Good job, ed Um. You can type the
words olive oil into the search bar of your favorite
search engine and it will bring up the whole world
of stuff for you. Just be aware, remember about it
is not real. Since I said that's time for listening
to mail, Oh no, it's not. You know what it's
time for? Oh yeah, you want me to say it

(51:57):
an administrative d that's right, Josh. This is when we
thank listeners for small tokens and large tokens of of
love and appreciation, appreciation they've sent to us here at

(52:21):
the Atlanta office. And I'm gonna start it off with
Lori from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who very sweetly sent my daughter
a Free to Carlo action figure because I talked about
how much she loved Free to Carlo and she loves
loves loves it. Thank you, Lorie, Thank you Lord. That
was very nice of you. I am going to start

(52:42):
off with Jim Sias and the Crown Royal team who
styled us out again. Yeah, man with some fifths of
Crown Royal and some very cool rocks classes that have
like the little crown on the pittole pillow like in
a hologram etched in the middle. Yeah, and it weighs
like a pound and a half. It's got some real
have to it. Plus they sent us candy too, which

(53:03):
is pretty nice. That was very nice. John nord Skogg
sent us boy, remember John, he sent us the He
calls it a code wheel. What we should probably do
is just put a picture of this thing up he um.
He he built it for I think a boy Scout
troop um. And then repurposed it as a wonderful gift

(53:23):
for us. But is we now have it hanging up
on the wall of the office John, we finally got
it up. Is this huge handmade thing of wonder of
interlocking gears and cranks that turn and you and it
eventually will spit out a paper code. I don't even
fully understand it yet, but it looks like something from

(53:46):
the ancient past, and it's just pretty amazing. It looks
really cool in our office. It's daunting, yes, and yeah,
we can't understand it, so it's definitely going to be
a wall piece from now on. Yeah, and imagine John
has been a fortune shipping that thing too. So many
many thanks John. Yeah, and I think we thanked John
last time, but that was a far better thank so
way to go, chuck Um. We got a We got

(54:09):
a lot of great gifts when we went to Australia
for our tour um. One of them was Janet from
Nano Girl Labs in New Zealand gave us a beautiful
hardcover edition of their book, Nano Girl Labs book, The
Kitchen Science Cookbook. And you can look up Kitchen Science
Cookbook dot com and it has all these different recipes

(54:29):
in it, and each recipe is a science experiment that
uses ingredients that are super easy to find a super
cheap and um. It turns out Janet, the chief operations
engineer for Nano Girl Labs, has been listening to us
since her teens. Since she was in her teens, So
I feel old, but thank you very much for that
awesome book. Yes, Emily Cool and Judge with Baxter Sin

(54:53):
this uh an invitation to their wedding in Idaho. Nice
Mazel tov. I wish we could have gone, uh and
Cam and Sonja, so they came to our Melbourne show. Um,
and remember they gave us the Tim TAM's and the
eight year old Tawny Port first so we could do
grown up Tim Tam slams. And I tell you that's

(55:15):
the only way to do Tim Tam slams. So with
Tawny Port, it's amazing. If you don't know what Tim
TAM's are, go to your local world market and buy
some and thank me later. Yes, for sure, Krista allen
Steen sent us art. Here's what she does. She takes
prints of atlas Is, road maps and stuff like that

(55:36):
and then paints over them with little sort of throwback
kitchen motel signs. And she sent us the Ohio and
Georgia because beautiful. You're from Toledo and I'm from Georgia.
That's right. They're very cool. Yeah, thank you for those. Um.
Jack Hawkins works at Star Wars whiskey. Remember that the

(55:56):
Star Wars that we got at the Melvin show. Uh,
we got some from him and it is beautiful stuff.
You can check it out at star Wars dot com
dot a you Alison Gallagher, she's one of my movie
crush buddies. She sent Uh, she sent me a mug
so this is probably a movie crush thing of Tri

(56:17):
Saratops that says crushing it nice. That's awesome. It's very cool. Bill.
This has to do with movies. But I don't know
if it was movie crushed Bill Wagon or sent us
the DVD of Mongol. Oh. Yeah, remember that one that
was for us, the one version of the Genghis Khan story.
That's that didn't star somebody like Omar Sharif or Um

(56:39):
the Duke. That's right. It was like actually a good movie.
I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
Ben flour Flo f l O r sent us his
h this is very cool reusable carbon fiber drinking straws.
Um Plastic straws are a very caused a jure. People
should up using them as much as possible. I saw

(57:02):
a little stat they oh they said they take um
like ten minutes to make, twenty minutes to use and
stay in the environment forever. Uh So Ben has a
company called Looster l U s t i R. Where
he makes these carbon fiber drinking straw as. They come
in a little carrying case that you can just throw

(57:23):
in your car your purse and if you like to
drink out of straws, then you can carry it around
and bring your own straw and say no, thank you,
I have my own straw. Yeah, it'd be like um
medieval times for everybody had to walk around with your
own spoon and if you lost your spoon, you starved
to death. That's right, um big thanks to Brad Ashmore
for sending us his book of short weird fiction. Had

(57:44):
he worn a different body, remember that one Angela from
Tasmania since some lovely, lovely knitted hats from Australian wool.
Nice thank you Angela. Um we got an awesome drawing
of us from Eugene Gorman. He did an awesome pencil
drawing of us and you can see it and all

(58:05):
of his other stuff on Instagram at Gorman Eugene. Check
him out. John D send his hand painted portraits. You
can go to John D dot com actually j O
h n d dot com to check out his art.
Thanks John, Those are very cool. The last one I've
got is from Ryan and the thirty year old engineer

(58:25):
who is apparently still tells people his age when he
says hi. He he sent in a pack of pilot
friction eraseable pen right. They disappear with heat and reappear
in the freezer, and they are pretty awesome. So thanks
a lot. Ryan. That's that's that's pretty cool. I'm still
I'm still a G two guy, but that's those are

(58:46):
nice pens, all right. I just got a couple of more.
William Dawson sent uh ukulele for music teachers and music therapists.
It's a book that he put together about how the
ukulele can be used as music therapy and it's very
cool and I do have a Uka lately, so I'm
gonna gonna take a look at that for sure you
got a future side career ahead of you. And then finally,

(59:07):
of course, uh, our buddies Lows Hillary and Mike Lows
are sent us along in their collaboration with Flathead Lake
Cheese in Montana. They sent usd uh, stuff you should Know,
Stuff you should know specific hopping mad gooda cheese so
good And we always get that flathead like cheese from

(59:29):
them every year and it's just super super kind. It's
the most wonderful time of the year it is when
we get that cheese. Also, I want to say, um,
we haven't heard from Little Bit Sweets in a long time.
I hope they're doing alright. Hint hint, Yeah, I'll hit
her up. It's been a minute. Please do well. If

(59:50):
you want to send us something, that is very nice
of you, but you don't have to send us anything.
You can just drop a line to say hi. You
can go to our website Stuff you Should Know dot
com and check out all of our social links. You
can find me hanging out on my website, the Josh
clark Way dot com and you can send me Jerry Chuck, Noel,
Matt Frank, the Chair and everybody an email at Stuff

(01:00:12):
Podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
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