I keep remembering Ruth Reichl’s closing words when she spoke at the Food & Morality-themed Oxford Symposium a couple of years ago: how where food is concerned, most of us want to do the right thing, if only we could figure out what that was. Vegetable oil labelling certainly makes it harder to do right by your salads.

From a health standpoint, extra virgin olive oil should be one of those right things, as long as it’s fresh when you get it and that you use it fairly quickly (regrettably most olive oil producers do not provide a harvest date on their labels).

Here’s a comforting article about why it’s worth paying more for good olive oil. Which usefully explains a bit about pomace oil, something I have seen on proudly labelled on sale in a few places here, and which I suspect few consumers know much about. And all that got me back to thinking about olive processing, which is a complex and many-layered subject.

Pomace oil is the cheapest possible kind of olive oil, on a par with industrial refined olive oil used for blending by the food industry. It was historically the lowest grade of oil: used for lamp oil, soap making or lubricating machinery.

Pomace is the residue of olive oil pressings: the pits and pulp of the olives, and is variously used as fuel, herbicide, animal feed, road building material, or mulch. But it may also be treated with solvents – because there’s not much extractable oil left – to extract the last of the oil, and then refined to make it edible.

Which from a nutritional and flavour standpoint makes this no better than other refined vegetable oils, (“refined” here is a manufacturing process and not a value judgement!) which are not “extracted only by mechanical means” as extra virgin olive oil is.

It’s the chemicals and heat which cause refined oils to have less character and nutritional value than cold-pressed oils. There have as well been health risks reported from consuming pomace oil.

But industrial olive processing has created some new problems: pollution and water consumption. For speed and convenience, the new olive oil extraction processes involve injecting water into the first of two, or sometimes three, phases of pressing, using centrifugal drums. The oil emulsifies with the water into a paste that emerges from the first phase and needs to be treated again, with more water, to separate them.

The so-called “vegetable waters” that result from this separation are contaminated with the inedible compound oleuropein in olives (try eating one off a tree sometime to understand the term “inedible”), and are considered toxic. This water is a major polluting by-product of olive production, whether for oil or for eating (eating olives must be repeatedly soaked and rinsed or brined to make them edible), and nobody has managed to work out a way of re-using this substance; worse, it can contaminate water supplies by seeping into groundwater.

“Vegetable waters” are not toxic in the way that chemical treatments are toxic, since they’ve been produced only by combining olives and water: but if dumped in water systems, they can cause eutrophication – meaning water pollution caused by excessive plant nutrients. The same kind of human-caused water pollution that results from runoff from agricultural fields, feed lots, lawns and golf courses, and sewage; which leads to algal blooms, oxygen depletion and a lot of dead fish.

This kind of pollution is a product of industrial olive oil processing. The traditional – laborious, low-yielding – method didn’t add water, so didn’t create contaminated vegetable waters, just our friend pomace, for which uses had always been found.

For eating olives, there has always been waste water from the curing process, further contaminated by the lye or salt used for brining; but the quantity has never before been as great as it is in today’s more populous world, and there were uses to which small quantities of this could be put: smoothing out plaster floors, oiling leather, keeping the weeds down in olive groves. But the volume is such, and our lives have changed so much, that there are no longer modern uses to which this can be put.

The special thing about the traditional method (now ponderously named “discontinuous extraction”) of extracting extra virgin olive oil is that it was done by crushing (mechanical means) alone, and chemicals and heat are not allowed to be used. So what you get is as pure an oil as you can get.

Other refined vegetable oils, for example sunflower, canola (rapeseed), soy, or “pure” (meaning refined) olive oil, typically undergo a process called hexane extraction. Hexane is a petroleum derivative, a toxic and potentially explosive substance with a poor environmental record; processors like it because it is an efficient way to extract the oil from seed crops. Other steps that may be needed to remove impurities that affect the flavour, odour, appearance, and shelf life of the oil include degumming (typically treating oil with steam followed by acid); neutralizing (with caustic soda); bleaching; and deodorizing. Which are terms that sound a lot less pure than a label that says simply “refined”.

I’ve been enjoying the summer repeats on CBC radio, and particularly the radio documentaries on Crossing Boundaries. One excellent program I heard – that might possibly get me to change my will – was A Life of Ashes, from Radio Netherlands, by Australian-Indian Dheera Sujan (you can read the story here). It’s about the plight of widows in India, a condition that has improved but still exists, particularly that of the rural poor. It made me wonder what widowhood’s social and economic hardships must have added to the appalling suffering of the widows of the farmers who’ve committed suicide, the extra legacy of the Green Revolution and agricultural subsidies. I’d seen the film Water, by Deepa Mehta, which the radio documentary mentions, and recommend that as well.

Meanwhile, Q – also on CBC – has had some good repeats of foodie interviews, including one with Alissa Hamilton, the author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice; one with Mark Bittman making good points about bad food; and one with Novella Carpenter about urban farming.

Just learned about a wonderful new source of short talks on ideas of interest and important. The TED Talks are 15-20 minute video presentations on all kinds of things, including food. Some of the ones I have enjoyed include

Ann Cooper talks school lunches – the fiery chef and head of nutrition for schools in Berkeley, CA quotes CDC stats that say up to 45 percent of school aged kids in the US will be insulin-dependent diabetics within the next decade;

Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat – talking about the climate change repercussions of eating meat (he’s not a vegetarian!) and the history of bad eating in the USA;

Cary Fowler: One seed at a time protecting the future of food – talking about the importance of biodiversity and the state of global seed banks in a time of climate change;

Dennis van Engelsdorp: a plea for bees – Pennsylvania’s state apiarist talking about bee issues, including varroa mites, colony collapse disorder, wild pollinators, kleptoparasitic bees, and Nature Deficit Disorder.

And there’s poetry too!

CK Williams reading poetry of youth and age;

Yann Arthus-Bertrand – kicking off with the Alberta tar sands – talking in pictures and words about environmentalism and Home: the movie.

How about that: honeybees on the terrace of a Vancouver hotel? Why not?

I was a little surprised to read this directive from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, as it had not crossed my mind that the government was so committed to nutritionism. The directive reiterates the Canadian law which requires that white flour sold in this country must be enriched, at a minimum, with thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid and iron; the optional enrichment items include vitamin B6, pantothenic acid, magnesium and calcium:

The Food and Drug Regulations (FDR) require that all white flour and all foods sold in Canada that contain white flour, such as bread, cookies, and pastries, be made from enriched white flour. The sale of unenriched white flour or foods containing unenriched white flour is not permitted in Canada.

Basically the law’s purpose as I read it is that if you refine flour to the point where its colour and texture are what we’re now used to, you have to replace by chemical means all the nutritional value you took out through the refinement process. Whatever keeps the wheels of commerce moving…

And finally, thanks to Pamela for passing it on, check out this site to see an annoying mechanical rodent robot that you can power with a string of fruit or vegetables.

Here’s some light entertainment to get us over the shock.

Thanks to Bernadette for sharing this link to the Fast Food Industry’s 7 Most Heinous Concoctions.

And here’s a Paolo Nutini video to get you dancing towards autumn…

The Google Book Settlement opting-0ut deadline is upon us: by September 4 you must decide whether you’re in or out. Staying in means allowing Google to digitize and own (for distribution purposes) your copyrighted works, for which you will be compensated (via a registry and your publishers) what remains of the approximately $60 per book after any fees or percentages have been deducted.

The dissenting voices in the Writers Union of Canada (TWUC) have offered the following view, relevant bits excerpted:

Google controls all the information and, there is no auditing system in place to prove their numbers.

It would be a minimum of five years before any money is received.

By opting in (or doing nothing), writers give Google non-exclusive rights to copyrighted material.

There are other electronic options [besides] Google [–and these might better compensate copyright holders].

To opt out… access Google online but no proof of receipt is generated from this. …a registered letter should also be mailed to Google. As an additional safeguard …a separate letter should also be written to Google, telling them that they do not have the rights to digitize your material without your express permission.

For future contracts… an “out of print” clause should be added to protect copyrighted material.

Some internal discussion points out that the settlement addresses past wrongs (the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works) but frees Google to sail ahead unrestricted in future, which seems hardly fair to the people who’ve worked so hard to create those works. And that other electronic options besides Google may afford the possibility of earning more than the pittance Google offers.