Books About Olive Oil That Fueled Our Obsession
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Time to read 8 min
Autumn always brings a sense of transition—school is back in session, harvest season is upon us, and we’ve been feeling a little like students ourselves lately.
After attending the Olive Oil Times Sommelier Certification course in New York earlier this year, we’ve found ourselves revisiting the roots of our olive oil journey with fresh eyes. Sitting in a classroom again reminded us how much we’ve learned since starting our small business from scratch—and how much there still is to learn.
This season, we’re going back to the beginning—re-reading the books that fueled our obsession with olive oil and helped shape the path from our family groves in the Aegean to your table. Whether you’re just getting curious about olive oil or already a devotee, these three reads are essential.
Three Books About Olive Oil to Deepen Your Interest and Knowledge
1. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil (2011)
Tom Mueller's Extra Virginity is a deeper exploration of the complex olive oil fraud story Mueller first explored in his 2007 article " Slippery Business" for The New Yorker magazine. Notably, Turkey was front and center in that article as a source of bulk oil (not all olive) destined for blending and relabeling in Europe - which piqued our interest then and continues to motivate our single origin mission today. Especially when olive oil fraud and mislabeling cases are on the rise or at least - more frequently detected - in response to increasing regulatory oversight and testing.
In the European Union, that is.
One of Mueller's key observations in Extra Virginity is that the olive oil industry is largely unregulated at the federal level in the United States - to the extent that industry lobbying groups have implored for more regulation and the state of California has opted to enforce its own standards for oil producers and sellers.
Mueller's narrative oscillates between present-day interviews with olive oil folks big and small and the cultural and criminal history of the trade, making for an entertaining and well researched expose that we're excited to revisit.
Fifteen years later, the research and insights raised in this investigative-style read are still very much relevant. Indeed, olive oil remains one of the most frequently adulterated food products in the global economy.
This is essential reading for anyone starting out in the industry and for anyone who consumes olive oil. After reading, you'll never think about this ancient food the same way again.
Image from Amazon
Top Takeaways from 'Extra Virginity':
Rampant fraud in the olive oil industry: Mueller exposes how much of the olive oil labeled “extra virgin” is often adulterated with cheaper refined oils or low-quality blends.
Well made extra virgin olive oil is rare and precious: Authentic extra virgin oil is a fresh, perishable fruit juice with complex flavors and proven health benefits, but it's often hard to find.
A call for consumer awareness and reform: Mueller advocates for stricter standards, transparency in labeling, and education to help consumers recognize real quality and support honest producers.
2. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World (2015)
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben is a similarly perspective-shifting book that has truly reshaped our relationship with our groves and reinforced our passion for organic approaches to farming.
While the nature lovers and intuitives among us know that trees - and all living things - are very much alive and deserving of our respect, Wohlleben shows us just how much so with his exploration of the latest research behind how trees feel, communicate, and exist in social networks as intricate as ours.
In a book that reads more like a conversation with a wise friend, Wohlleben describes - among many other facts - how tree parents care for tree children, how healthy trees send nutrients to ailing neighbors, and how trees communicate about threats - like dangerous fungi or invasive pests - by sending scent messages and underground electrical signals to neighbors. He explains how vast underground root and mycelium networks act as a giant “brain” for forests, conjuring images of our own nervous systems stretched out like branches and roots of a tree.
We have much more in common than we think about.
Image from Amazon
"Trees are social beings, bound together by invisible threads of care and communication.”
Naturally, this book had us looking more fondly at our trees and asking, “are we doing all that we can for them, when they give us so much?”
Ayvalik is covered by a sea of 2.5 million olive trees composed of mostly small, family-owned plots handed down for generations. While chemical pesticide use has slowly increased in some parts of the region, most fields here - including ours - remain organic and cared for with traditional, slow methods. This is largely the case throughout the Mediterranean basin where centuries-old groves blanket the landscape.
We encounter many people here with a deep reverence for the trees. But in some olive-producing regions globally, heavy use of chemicals and industrial farming methods have commoditized olive production into something that looks more like bulk oil “crops” like corn or soy.
Acknowledging that high expenses in olive farming are a motivating factor, we recall again the practice we observed in our travels of “super-high-density” (SHD) olive producers routinely cutting down trees that had reached only ten years old because they are too large to withstand the beatings of relatively new industrial harvesters. SHD olive farming plants the trees in neat hedgerow-style rows over which this equipment can drive.
High density olive farming requires young, limber trees whose trunks can vibrate as well as heavy amounts of pesticides and herbicides because of the more congested farming style (turns out, olive trees need space to breathe, just as we do, and get sick or overwhelmed by pests when they are too crowded). Knowing that olive trees can live and produce fruit for thousands of years, we were shocked to learn of their being discarded in such a routine, “strategized” way.
These modern, machine-led farming approaches are designed to harvest olives as hands-free and efficiently as possible - but at what cost?
Grandfather olive trees in our family fields in Ayvalik
Wohlleben's claim that trees scream and warn neighbors when they are in pain comes to mind.
They stand in stark contrast to more intuitive methods we’ve observed at home. It makes us think of the man we met in the fields who parked his scooter to tell us how one year, he watched his trees’ branches visibly droop when he and his crew arrived for harvest. He understood it was too early in the season - the trees weren’t ready. Having spent his entire life with them, he spoke their language, and he told the crew to pack it up.
He said he listens to the trees, they tell him what they need, and they produce beautiful fruit in return. And it was true - his fields were thriving.
We have a feeling Wohlleben would agree with his approach. The Hidden Life of Trees is another highly recommended, easy read that might just change the way you think about trees forever.
Related Reading
→ Mother Trees and Socialist Forests: Is the ‘Wood-Wide Web’ a Fantasy? — Daniel Immerwahr, The Guardian (The Long Read), April 23, 2024.
3. The Olive Oil Diet: Nutritional Secrets of the Original Superfood (2016)
Lastly, if you’re at the stage in your olive oil journey where you know you “should” be eating more EVOO but don’t know why, or don't know how to incorporate this incredible food into your diet in a more habitual way, The Olive Oil Diet: Nutritional Secrets of the Original Superfood by Dr. Simon Poole and Judy Ridgway is a deeply researched, easy to read primer on all things olive oil nutrition that will provide the inspiration you need.
The book provides an easy-to-read, science-backed explainer for why a diet rich in fresh extra virgin olive oil is vital to improving health and warding off lifestyle diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia that so many of us unfortunately experience or have watched a loved one suffer through.
Beyond nutrition science, the authors provide curious readers with information on olive oil chemical analysis, variation in olive types around the world (hundreds of different varieties are used to produce olive oil, all with different flavor profiles!), and 100 recipes to make incorporation of EVOO into daily diet easier.
We had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Poole this summer in New York, where his presentation expanded on the research of this book to include the latest findings including a 2020 study of 79,000 participants that showed that overweight / obese participants following a Mediterranean diet had lower mortality rates than participants with a normal BMI who did not adhere to a Mediterranean diet.
In other words, the study showed it’s better in terms of health outcomes and longevity of life to be overweight but following a Mediterranean diet, versus being a “normal” weight following a standard American diet.
These findings challenge much of what we’ve been told for decades in our low-fat-obsessed Western diet culture and underscore why the Mediterranean diet - for the eighth consecutive year - has been hailed as the best overall diet for nutritional completeness and evidence based effectiveness.
Image from Amazon
We return to this book when we need fact-based evidence for why fresh EVOO makes us feel the way we feel - that we’re swallowing an elixir of life, glowing green fresh out of the press, full of vitality. It’s not just imagined. Extra virgin olive oil is truly health changing and therefore, life changing.
“Extra virgin olive oil is perhaps the oldest and most convincing superfood.”
Conclusion
Whether you're a newcomer to the olive oil industry or a consumer who's heard about olive oil fraud or nutrition and wants to go deeper, these three titles are our top recommendations. Together, they provide curious readers with a solid foundation in olive oil history, fraud, and nutrition as well as new perspective on the trees that make this ancient superfood available to us. Beyond the invaluable information they contain, they are all enjoyable reads that opened our minds wider to the wonders of olive oil world and truly changed the trajectory of our business (and life!) We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
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Easy Mediterranean Diet Recipes
Meet the Authors
Hi! We're Erin and Umut - third generation olive oil producers, sommeliers, and life partners building Ayvaco from the ground up. Our mission is to share Ayvalik's beautiful single origin olive oil with the world. We bring a decade of combined experience in engineering, international relations, and research to our work that helps us see across borders, connect the global with the local, and craft the freshest EVOO possible.
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