Olive: A Global History (Edible) by Fabrizia Lanza

Author:Fabrizia Lanza
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2012-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Ancient olive tree cared for by Franciscan monks at the Garden of Gerusalem, American colony, Jerusalem, 1900–10.

The missionaries maintained their olive groves until Mexico’s emancipation from the Spanish crown in 1822, when the new Mexican government took possession of all Spanish public lands in California. Eleven years later, in 1833, Mexico secularized the missions, seizing the land from the church and attaching it to the colony of California. When the Franciscans left the missions and abandoned their fields and orchards, there was no one to tend them, and the olive groves languished. Nevertheless, a few trees survived at the San Jose mission and in San Diego, while the oldest ones, dating back to 1805, were still alive at the Santa Clara mission in 1996, as recalled by Judith M. Taylor.1

These scanty but tenacious shoots of Old World culture and of the olive’s several thousand-year-old history were the germ of a new direction for the olive. This new chapter in its story takes place not in little orchards or family olive groves but on a global scale, in vast, single-crop tracts of olive trees on nearly every continent, using intensive agriculture and the most sophisticated technology.

Between 1850 and 1900 olive growers in California had begun to improve their product. Cultivars were imported from Mediterranean countries and by the end of the century California growers had mastered the art of making good olive oil. Production increased notably. But for various reasons, olive oil produced in America did not find much of a domestic market. The great majority of the rapidly expanding US population had never even tasted olives and had only a marginal taste for olive oil. The same was true in Britain: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the olive oil exported from southern Italy to Great Britain was largely used to grease factory machinery, while a small quantity was used, grudgingly, as medicine. As the old English saying ‘brown as olive oil’ suggests, most people in Britain had never even seen good olive oil, let alone tasted it. Up until the 1970s pharmacies were the only place in Britain where one could find olive oil. It was stocked as a laxative.

In the US only the Hispanic population ate olives; they alone knew how to cure them and how to cook with olive oil. In California they most probably harvested olives from the trees abandoned at the missions, while later, when Italian immigrants arrived en masse to the US in the second half of the nineteenth century, they bought and used olive oil liberally, but not, as we have seen, the oil produced in California. Nearly 80 per cent of the immigrants who settled in California came from regions where olives had been cultivated for centuries: Lucca in Tuscany, and Sicily. They understood the value of California’s olive groves and possessed the skills to cultivate and prune the trees.

Yet it was precisely the Italians of this mass immigration who consistently bought imported Italian olive oil right up until the 1910s. The

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