By Eva Rendel Full article can been seen here at National Geographic » The theft occurs sometime before dinner. We’re sitting at a long dining room table pouring glasses of water and wine when Ricardo walks in and asks if someone has moved one of the 50-liter canisters of freshly pressed olive oil. It’s early… click to read more

By Liz Barratt-Brown There should be nothing but the pure juice from olives in your olive oil.  But in a book released this year, American Tom  Mueller reveals that often olive oil is adulterated with other, less valuable oils and mixed with solvents to extract as much oil as possible.  This applies even to oils… click to read more

No matter what you call them, harvesting olives requires hard labor. On the morning of the tafona, a dozen of us set off into the mountainside armed with buckets, bags, long poles and huge nets to surround the base of the trees. The olives are hard and green, and are brought down only by energetically thrashing the branches with poles, or by climbing into the gnarled trees and pulling them off by hand.