Culinary Commodities

local farmers in Southeast Asia. Next stop, we meet wet Stone co founder Melissa she in Spain, where she is reintroduced to another familiar fruit that is being harvested, green and unripe, and it is used to produce one of the world's most ancient natural cooking oils. As we follow these familiar culinary commodities on their journey from their place of origin to our kitchens and plates, we learned about honoring the origins and how markets, supply, and demand are

shaping the futures of these crops today. On point of origin, join us as we dive deep into the world of culinary commodities. It's the Fruit Edition, and we're exploring some of the curious conundrums that they face today. But they

can stay alive. The seeds stays alive while it floats, so it floats on the seas and it sprouts on whatever coasted lands, on tropical coasted lands on In southeastern India, organic farmer and permaculturalist Symritate Molly started noticing that farmers in her area, we're beginning to experiment with a new type of crop which historically wasn't grown in the area

because it was at too high of an altitude. I'm in the mountain in the Palony Hills of South India, so it's quite high and I run out coop with the farmers, with the local farmers in my village and consim rates farming community. The effects of climate change over the past few years have been immediate and apparent. Basically, the mountains have been getting warmer and warmer, and so every year the coconut kind of climbs higher and higher, so the coconut can grow at a higher altitude. And

the local farmers in my area were noticing this. And where it's colder now it's getting warmer, so it's easier for a coconut to grow there. Basically, coconuts are really hardy plants and they'll grow anywhere they have a temperature of higher than twenty two degrees celsius. So the farmers in my area were starting to experiment growing coconuts in our area, trying to predict the future and the fact

that it's going to get warmer. So that's what made me interested in researching where coconuts were from and the kind of conditions they need to grow. So the origins of coconut are kind of murky, and there wasn't the any test that was done. It couldn't pinpoint any one origin. There were two strains that were found. One was from the Indian Ocean and the other was on the Pacific Ocean, so it was really divided across two oceans, which connects with the fact that the coconut is a seafaring fruit.

I think it's one of the only ones in the world. So the coconut has been traveling on the oceans around the world for millennia before humans have been traveling. Definitely, and contrary to popular belief, it's we don't have colonizers to thank for the coconuts. But yeah, so I like to call it a seafood. That's interesting. So when you say that it's a seafaring fruit, you mean that coconuts without the help of humans, can propagate on the water.

Is that right, Yeah, they have been propagating on on water. They can. They can stay alive. The seeds stays alive while it floats. It also floats, so it floats on the seas and it sprouts on whatever coasted lands on tropical coasted lands on Coconuts are so unique because of their seafaring nature. They can be found throughout the global South, having self propagated along shorelines over thousands of years, likely

long before humans were even around. Today, they firmly planted into local and regional cuisines in South Asia, making coconuts foundational and a stable not only in diets as a way of life in coastal India, the Philippines and Indonesia the top producers of coconut in the world. The coconut plant provides more than just meat, milk, and oils for

food and sustenance. So it's typically an island house would have around for coconut trees and you can build your house and make your clothes and have fuel, water, food, alcohol. Everything started for you with those trees. So it's known as the tree of life, and it's very easy to have a self sustainable lifestyle with these four coconuts, so it's worshiped. Basically, in the India, we use a coconut

in all our rituals. The coconut is cracked before you start anything new, or get married or any of the like life's big moments. So it's a symbol of fertility, the womb. But it's also a symbol of your ego as all as your head. So it's like your sacrificing your ego. Every time you break a coconut, it signifies it or your your head or your ego. Basically, I sort of like that image. It's a pretty intense one. The idea of the coconut representing your head and then

being machett id open to get to the flesh. That's sort of the ultimate sacrifice. I guess, yeah it is. It is so basically they used to sacrifice. I don't know if you want to say this day of but they used to sacrifice people and animals in the old days. But instead of instead of sacrificing them, they break a coconut. So the blood and the water coming out the fresh coconut, so it looks like the head. Wow, I will never eat another coconut without thinking about that. Um, that's that's

pretty amazing. So I want to ask you again or go back to you know, the role of the coconuts. I guess, not really the role, but like the sudden demand over the last five years. As a consumer, it seems to me, if I had to guess, I would say that the trend of the health conscious types who are drinking coconut water on a daily basis, sometimes around the clock, is coconut water. What we have to blame for this sudden spike in demand? Yeah, I think so.

I mean I was doing some research. I found that the top players in the globle coconut water market is Vita, Coco, Google Cola, and PepsiCo. So I mean they have huge marketing apartments and budgets, so they're shifting to something I guess that's more health conscious, but the whole system is still the same rate, So I don't know how healthy

that actually is. We may have all noticed and prescribed to the boom and foods, oils and drinks, not to mention supplements that are derived from the coconut beyond just coconut water. Large corporate, multinational food producers are scrambling to keep pace with the rapidly growing demand and global taste for all things coconut. The problem has become because prices around the world have increased so much because of its it's like trendy now, so people wanna make money off it.

Coconut is a very sensitive tree, and because of the mono cropping, and because of the fact that they're probably putting fertilizers and petrochemicals to help the coconut grow, the land of the soil is getting depleted and the productivity of the tree has become almost less than it was

thirty years ago. So the major problem around the world is that the countries and plantations that have been supplying coconut around the world are now producing less and less of it, which is why the price of coconut oil is rising as it is an almost in the past five years wow. And so the cost of the coconut has gone up as the levels of production have decreased.

Is that what you're saying, Yeah, yeah, the demand is way higher than the supply, which means that now those four coconuts that a family has on an island, they would rather sell it and get money and buy those clothes and fuel from somewhere else instead of using the coconut they have. I mean, I'm a bit of an extremist.

There's no real solution to the food supply chain around the world, and I don't believe that it's wrong for Americans or anyone in the global not to use coconut, But I just think that just going local is just the easiest solution. So of course, now coconuts are not seafaring anymore. They don't propagate themselves, so they're not flowing on the sea and landing up on coursts and planting themselves. So they're being planted in huge monocrops, plantations in the

areas where they are traditionally grown. So it's kind of getting to the place where palm oil is. We're moving a large rainforests are natural um landscape. It's to grow coconut because of how how much money they get you through exports. It's a twofold thing. So because of global warming, we can grow more coconuts and higher places, and not necessarily just by the coast, but also where they've already traditionally been growing. They aren't yielding as much coconut as

they used to. Because of the way that they're being grown. We'll be right back with wet Stone co founder Melissa she him Hice. Even mal is my business partner and the co founder of wet Stone. She's in and Lucia, Spain to introduce us to the farmers and the community that have been growing the fruit bearing trees from our

next story for many generations. How are these growers balancing innovating while also preserving tradition and honoring origin, especially in an industry that many think of it's just a commodity. Here in the sea of trees. We're standing on soil that is a deep brick red. It's crumbly clay like infused with the color of rust. And when you look up, all that meets I is this continuous canopy of leaves that are crowning these noveley branches and tree trunks of

the olive tree. You don't have to look too closely to see that each canopy is dotted with the unripe greens and darker blacks of maturing fruit. And just to give you an example, like one tree, one olive tree is maybe a case of of of olive oil. Only one tree. It's just one case bottles. That's it nine ms. So it takes a lot of trees to make a lot of olive oil. One lot is usually around on twenty tho liters. Okay, so you need to be moving

quickly unloading. They're ali's depending on the quality of the olive or the variety of the olive. Today, the morning sky is calm, bright and luminous, while at the same time being completely blanketed by airy and pillowy clouds. There's a skyhike cover that is so vast and high up in the atmosphere that makes the sprawling landscape we're standing in feel all at once both smaller and a little more comprehensible, but also grander and of an unimaginable scale.

We're here amongst the olive groves of Hlio is STEPA with Kyle Davis, an expert manager and an expert in regional olive oil production. We're harvesting olives here in Andalusia, and we're meeting one of the five thousand farmers that Kyle works with. It's almost mid day, but it still feels like dawn is breaking and the day is not quite fully emotion But then stillness is abruptly broken by

the sounds of an early harvest in full swing. So they'll grab the tree with the tractor on the with like kind of a fork on the bottom, and then they open up this batman upside down umbrella underneath the tree. They shake the tree with that fork. All of the olives fall into the umbrella and go right into a hopper. Once the oppera is full, the hopper dumps it into a trailer. Once the trailer full, the trailer goes to the mill. One farmer brings a trailer to the mill.

He's going to first check in with a computer screen and he's gonna scan his ID badge. His ID badge is going to pull up a plot of his land, and he's gonna indicate on the computer exactly where he just harvested. Traceability starting to be not just the farmer, but the actual plot of land that he just harvested from. The day drop the alive the olives like we saw

being collector's gonna happital piece of sticks. This ability to trace fruit back to the original plot of land it was harvested from is one of the factors that makes

old a step as so unique. The farmers details on its harvest of the day are one of numerable inputs and bits of data that Old As Stepa's oils mills carefully monitor each step of the process, from when an olive arrives at the mill to the process of cold extraction of oil, to testing for different physical and chemical properties, storage and bottling, makes the process here perhaps one of

the most advanced in the world. The olive groves at ol Stepa, like the one being harvested here today, have an ancient history dating back more than two millennia, but it is in more recent history. Over the last half century, the agriculture and the region has been revolutionized and technologized, allowing producers like ol Stepa to access the most up

to date oil extraction machinery. At the heart of ole As Stepa's business lies an approach to all of farming that is very different from the models we see around the world. The cooperative model in Spain is pretty unique. I don't think that there's any other country in the world that's really has as many cooperatives as Spain and really has such a country that's so open to cooperation, not just on like an agricultural level, but on a

on a citizen level. I mean there's I mean people here in Spain, I would say, you know, two thirds of the population at one time or another has been a volunteer or collaborates with NGO. Spain is a very is a society that likes to cooperate and and assets. They have a lot of cooperatives and that's very different than countries like Italy, for example, in terms of olive oil, and there's no there's no there's no real olive oil cooperatives in Italy. There's a lot of small farmers or

medium sized farmers that own their own small mill. But the cool thing about having an olive oil cooperative is is that you join the efforts of a large amount of people who individually wouldn't be able to afford an olive mail and you all milt together and you're all kind of in the same boat, and you all kind of follow the same philosophy. And the cool thing with ely a stepans like our flow has been quality driven, and that's not necessarily the cooperative model. Across Spain. In

terms of olive oil, we have kind of everything. We have small family farmers that might own only you know, maybe fifteen or twenty actors, and then we have larger farmers who have been we have inherited land over various generations and in our farming actors, so we have kind of have everything in between. But they're all in the same boat, you know, and they're all fighting for excellence. Okay. So we pay our farmers much more money for the per kilo of olive than any other cooperative in Spain,

and that's undisputable. As Kyle explains, their concept is really simple. Olio a step overpaced farmers for early harvest oil, so that growers are incentivised to get olives off the tree and into the mill as quickly as possible. And why is it that more unripe and greener olives produce the higher quality oil. And the most important factor, I'd say

there is the time of harvest. And so as the olive tree produces a flower and the flower gets pollinated and the olive sprouts on the branch, it starts off green, okay, and it it's green. And as it growing and it's green, and it makes it reaches its maximum size. And as it reaches its maximum size, and as it starts to mature more, it turns from green to purple to black, okay, and then it falls off the tree. The maximum fat content of the olive is going to be when it's

almost ready to fall off the tree. But the amount of polyphenols, the amount of fruit that you're going to get out of that olive are going to be lower than if you were to harvest it earlier. And so that's what you see early harvest and earlier, you know, on bottles, etcetera. Harvesting early, you get less fat, you get less oil out of the olive, but the quality is a lot higher. So what exactly are these polyphenols that Kyle is talking about. They are the micro nutrients

that give olive oils it's so called superpowers. Green olives especially, are rich and polyphenols that we can only get through certain plant based foods, and together with other dietary reducing agents such as vitamin C and vitamin E, are referred to as antioxidants. Higher polyphenols also increase the shelf life of olive oil, but are a key factor in contributing to the most defining and desired flavor factor of high quality olive oil. Bitterness, by the way, the one and

only basic flavor in oil is bitterness. The rest is have to taste like all the aromas and tag tile sensations, like the stringency and dry our mouth and spiciness that we can feel anywhere in the mouth or maybe in the throat. Even this is Alfonso Fernandez something in a kind of joke. Away, I can say that I'm a

priest of olive oil, so I I make believers. I want to tell too, for the people to know what is the truth about olive oil and everything that they can learn and enjoy and how to use and how good is for the health everything, because I hate national listm on on olive oil, even if I'm lucky enough to be they're talking about olive oil or from a

spin all over the world. But I mean many of the love trees that we have, they have been with us longer than many borders that we have to We have folive trees with more than two thousand, three thousand years old. Alfonso has devoted himself to sharing knowledge and understanding of olive oil, it's history and its cultural heritage here in Spain and beyond the borders that define his country. He's what's called an oleologist, the name for an olive

oil tasting expert. Importantly, Alfonso emphasizes that what makes olive oil really unique is not just that it's an ancient product, but that it's a completely all natural product. After all, Spanish aciet for oil is derived from Arabic azayet or olive juice. It's unlike many of our cooking oils today that go through different refining processes. But the main thing that nothing that everybody will understand quite easily. Extraorginally oil is real food. So he's the fatty juice of a fruit.

So all the extracted by mechanical means, so the end it's like a juice, but releasing the water. I mean it has natural polyphonos that is a natural antioxidant. The people that they don't like the bitterness, the bitterness is one of the best antioxidants that we have. And these are the kind of things that the oly world will bring to us that not many other facts that is going to give us. His family has been farming in the northern region of Andalusia for generations. As you know,

I'm I'm part of olive wall farmers family. My brothers are still around the family farming with olive trees. My uncle's my grandpa. He got retired with seventy two years old from the farming. So I've being devoted to this for a long long time since fift generations far Us I know and for me, olive all is a big, big passion. We have to we have to give them much more than we usually give because some people they

consider this a commodity. And I think that they've been with us for so long time that we need to give respect. That is what they've given to us. The other world. Yes, it's in I. I come from my small village that is called Montea's almost in the center of Andalusia geographical center, and Aluthia is like if you're bend over Portugal, but to cross over Spain. And it's the largest production area in the world. When I say the largest, is the only my region or Spain, but

I think that is the largest. The olive crops, the olive trees planted in Spain is the largest artificial olive grove olive forest in the world. That's my thought. Alfonso's family farm is located in Cordoba, the province of Andalusia, which along with neighboring province Jayenne, produces thirty of the

entire world's production. That's a lot of olive trees. And Alusia is the most populous area in Spain and has a temperate climate with hot, dry summers and mild winters that has made it an agricultural haven for thousands of years. No one knows exactly where the olive tree originated, but has been naturalized to the Mediterranean basin, including here in Andy Lucia and across Spain, flourishing on uncultivated lands for millennia.

Farmers over generations have bred and propagated plants for culinary uses, developing cultivars that flourish in their local to war, which has led to the thousands of different varietals and the world see today. In Spain alone, there are actually hundreds of types of olives. We have two farms. One is in here in Montalvande, Corlova, and the other one is very close to Cordova, to Cordova village. It is not a big surface. In total is about sixty actors more

or less. And yes, and we treated with a lot of respect with pequala and Arbkina varieties, and pequala has been with us for centuries here and pequal is one of the varieties. We have been explained in Spain more than more than three hundred varieties all over the world more than one thousand, and each variety is like a different flavor profile and the friend behavior. It's like we're

talking about wine, like different types of grapes. The flavors and characteristics of each olive as well as its appearance is completely unique. Alfonso walks us through how to taste olive oil and how you might process the flavors. Unlike wine, extra virgin olive oil is the only food product that has to undergo a tasting test, highly systemic and tightly controlled panel in order to be classified or named as extra virgin olive oil, which is part of what Alfonso does.

Something that's important to mention about Alfonso is that he's not just an oleologist, He's also a wine teaster. In Spain. I have to tell you that I'm not only a olive oid taster, I am also wine taster. Um. I'm in a panel test of three determinations of origin here in Spain. I have a w c T three level three cores already passed, and so I know what is to taste wine and then now what is to is

the olive oil. And it's not better or worst. I mean you have less steps on tasting olive oil, but you need to know how to taste the olive oil. And I want to make it very simple and and you can. You can think about tasting olive oil like dancing the bowls. You know that abowts is one to three, one, two threes every every time every time they sends steps, So tasting olivel is basically the same. So first step is the intensity of roma. We call that fruitness can

be robust, medium or low. Then we have the second one that is what type of roma we are getting out of that olivel. And that is the main thing because it has to remind us always too alive things on the nature. So an extrovergin only oil has to remind us always to something that is alive and fresh. If it's musty, if it's fermented, if it's run seed, if it's it's not going to be a good property

for the extra regin level. And then the third step is when you put in your mouth, and that is quite relevant because they have to taste for human is quite quite important. Something really important is that we have. We need to salibrate properly in the mouth. When we taste olible, we just take a little zip, not that much so that one we salibrate, we motion it. We make a kind of like when you're tasting wine, you

inhale summer. In the olive oil, we do the same but a little bit more sharply, let's say a little bit more aggressive. But if you're not used to do that, we make a kind of noise. I don't know if the people will be able to recognize it on the podcast, but it's going to be something like that. Can I do it? Yes, it's a kind of zip's it's like you in here somewhere. And if you don't know how to do that, because the problem of that is that

you have to cut quite aggressively. It just tumble it down with your tongue and keep the olivel in your mouth about thirty seconds or forty five seconds and enjoyed, enjoy it, and then you'll solow it up. And you know what happens if you solow up too quickly, that is going to have much more spiciness than what it really has. And people is quite sensitive to a spineness along with the flavor ideas of grain and of nature and life and of spiciness. One flavor profile that we

come back to you is a taste of bitterness. This is an olive oil flavor that some might find unfamiliar, perhaps stark, but for olive oil, it's actually a defining characteristic. This bitterness is an indication of a high level of polyphenols, specifically flavoroid polyphenols that give us this taste. In fact, the absence of bitterness in olive oil is what defines it to be a sweet olive oil. Yes, it is

like in wine. They have the they have the Channin's is exactly the same one that we have in the olivel that is making that bitterness, and the bitterness comes from the variety. Not every oil has bitterness. When there's no bitterness on the olivel, we call it, we name

it as a sweet olive oild. That for the people that is not used to that bitterness and they don't know how to play with that on on the kitchen, they can use a variety that we call sweet so they don't have that kind of bitterness that they don't like. And they don't like because it's not because they don't like. They don't like because they don't expect it from the fact. While I have a nice story because my my grandpa

he used to name from i'm inni montal one. He used to name the type of olive oils extraorgin oi oils like two ones. It's like we have white wine and red wine. He used to name it like white oil and black oil. The main two varieties in my area are ochilaka that means wide leaf and pequal. Piqual comes from the peak at the ends shape of the olive. And he used to name the biguel like black olive olive oil and the one from ahelanka the white olive wild.

And it's because the piqua was deepest and more robust extorginally oil, and the ahrilanka is more has less bitterness and less stringency, let's say. And it's more aromatic, or usually it's more aromatic than pequal. Now with the state of the art technology that we have, we can get everything out of our knowlive to give plenty of a Roman flavor. So the pequal is like rubbust high intensity aroma. Tomato leaves is a little bit of green grass, olive

olive leaves are romans and it's absolutely wonderful. I love it. I can't think about cooking without piqua at all. And there are alan see okay, I would like to show you a very good example to illustrate what I'm saying. You're going to see. The Olioteca is there is the name that we have given to this special place. Is something unique in the world. We have a justing in in front of the building, a very big collection. It's something unique and we have more than one hundred and

fifty varieties comporting countries. Very is already black. But I'm standing in the world's only library for olive trees. The Oleo Teca, founded to preserve and study the bio diversity within the olive family. Honest Sanchez is an educator and coordinator at the Juana Amone Gillon Foundation, which focuses on breaking the rural sector and the olive farming in Spain

closer to the public. Since late eighties, while the region's cultivation of olive trees intensified, leading to common mass production practices like mono cropping that have eliminated some of the diversity of the olives being farmed. The Foundation has been growing the varietals and its oleo teca. Many of these trees here are more than thirty years old, while some of the newer transplants are just two or three years old and incredibly already bearing fruit for study. It's like

a garden, okay. They We produce olive oil with each variety every year from like some for example, we have brought varieties from Israel or maybe Go Mexico, Albania, Syria

or Italy. So we study each variety. How is the niman, how is is the best way to produce each olive oil um, how it grows in our in our land, dying in our property, and how is the evolution To study in bio diversity seeks to understand not only the different traits and benefits unique to each type of olive, how local t is expressed, and how different olives vary

when grown in different regions of the world. The Foundation partners with local universities and research groups understand traits such as physiochemical properties and their correlation to disease prevention, and physical properties of the plant like heartiness or resistance to disease. We'll come back to the importance this work later, but for now, let's wander through the growth on it to meet some of the unique varieties from the olives being

cataloged and preserved here. Although all of these trees have similar structural characteristics, a beautiful variety of colors, shapes, textures, and sizes of fruit showcase the level of diversity possible even within a closely related group of species. There's so many characteristics that seem to be different. Some fruit or small and round couple of shapes, while others, like the Sartha espana, a variety a typical to Spain is wrinkled

and almost unidentifiable as an olive our other varieties. For example, we have a god it's a typical variety from a Spain is a very big one. But you can think, or you may think that the quality is going to be better because it's bigger, that the fruit is bigger, or it's going to be to produce a out more

quantity because it's bigger down for example are beginna. But it isn't necessary to be like this, because you can have a very high quality oil from the variety Abkina, and the goal isn't used to produce oils just for for it. The Godals Sivianna is a beloved Spanish cultivar and the biggest variety of olive by a large margin. It's got a huge pit that's proportionately as large as its pulpy flesh. Because it's low in oil content, this variety is commonly seen as the teple olive and not

used for production. The Cora nick olive originating from the Peloponnese, looks actually opposite or at all. It yields super high intensity fruit that yields lots of oil. It's constant yields of fruity balanced oil have also made it one of the most popular olives ground an injuries. And you see for example a colneg it's a variety from grief that have a very good property and the flavor is a very interesting a variety to study and maybe to develop

in the future, we don't know. And we have a very particular one that it for example, as a blancot is the wild olive Greek, but they are blanco. White is very particular because the old when the time of the harvest, thing arrives thanks to white instead to to black. So it's a very special one. The oil isn't so good, but it's a very particular old to show people that hams to to affend a good man to visit as to explain how important and how it divers and how

big is the olive oil sector. That's the reason of our foundation to explain all the people, to educate people and to to show them going for a walk. It's the easier way to explain them how important is the olivel sector for Spain and for our culture. The foundation promotes olive oil culture. Okay, nowadays we are using many innovative techniques, maybe in the development of new businesses in in many companies or many sectors, but especially in the olive oil sector. We try to balance the use of

the innovation with the tradition in Spain. Spain is the main producer of olive oil in the world, that's a fact. And the eighty percent of the olive oil that is produced by Spain is from Andalusia. It's a very important point because two hundred and fifty families of Andalusia depends on the olive oil sector. So we have to explain how important is the oil, the olive oil in our culture, in our society. Okay, how important is for our history, for our tradition. It's anna details. Olive oil is an

ancient pillar to diets here. The average Spaniard consumes one leader per month, and this integral role in diet is true to cultures throughout the Mediterranean basin. Along with the growing global taste for olive oil and the pressure to produce more is unquestionable. Growths here in Andalusia today are dominated by piqual Oli blanca and Urbikina, and Pequal specifically has become the world's most prolific olive account for half

of Spain's olive trees. These varietals hardiness, high oil content and high polyphenal content have made them favorites for intensive mass growing. The story sounds familiar because it is farming in the twenty one century around the world have brought to question many practices about how highly demanded crops are produced and what that means for farmers, farm workers, local agriculture and economies, and for the health of the land and environment in the face of not just a changing climate.

In a changing environment, there's also international tree attentions to consider, which we want covered today. The end of the day, one of the most overwhelming forces that farmers are beholden to is simply the supply and demands of a commoditized market. And it's become especially problematic for our farmers in Spain since the price has fallen below the cost of production in the past couple of years. Because Kyle Davis, our first expert from Olio as stepa co Op at least

sums it up. I definitely feel for a lot of the small farmers who you know, their their entire livelihood depends on the crop and and on prices being at

reasonable levels. But the fact of the matter is is that there's been a lot of olive trees planted over, you know, throughout Spain over the last five ten years, and there was a really large amount of production um in terms of the two thousand and nineteen twenty harvest, and there was a lot of carryover as well after a record harvest in the two thousand and eighteen nineteen harvest, And so there's just a lot of olive oil in the market, and it just kind of comes down to

supply and demand, and so you know, when there's a lot of oil, people dropped their prices and and and so on. Fortunately, we're in a situation where the current prices for all three categories Lampante, virgin and virgin extra are pretty much below cost of production, which is which

is tough for the farmers for sure. While co op structures and pricing practices like that of Oleo Steppa may help protect farmers from some of the volatility we see in global supply and demand, perhaps these co op models can be a part of the solution for the future, but it's yet to be told whether these incentives we enough to help maintain the livelihood of farmers in the industry, Like sym rates farming community in India who have become

interested in coconut farming as a new cash crop. Kyle describes that for small farmers that are hurting now, we see groves and parcels of land that were historically producing all of are being replanted for crops that are paying more now, like almonds. This feels like a complex conundrum because at the end of the day, it brings to question our entire global food system, and there's not an easy way to understand, let alone solve for the complexities

that that may brain. So where do we go from here? My answer for consumers can be in making informed voting decisions based on what we purchase. At the end of the day, I think it's most important to start from an understanding of origin and where the things we eat and drink come from. Supporting small farmers and producers who are socially environmentally responsible is also a great starting point for olive oil. Our friends in Spain encourage us to

understand and support biodiversity within olives. Supporting the farmers like our friends in Spain that are preserving this richness and plants and crops from around the world can help honor cultural origins, but can also hold a key to resilience in solving conundrums. In our edible Commodities features h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h. Thank you to our guests on this episode, farmer Symritt, Molly Kyle Davis of Oleo Steppa, oleologist Alfonso Fernandez, and an

A Sanchez of the Wan ramon Gian Foundation. To learn more, check out our website www. Wet Stone magazine dot com, including for tips on how to taste and select olive oil and how to just generally better appreciate the global diversity of unique cultivars h m hm, h m hmm.