Olive Oil: Mother Nature's Gift

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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.

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

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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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. 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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 Podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.