Il Calabria PGI Oil Consortiumhas been carefully observing everything that is happening regarding fraud in the olive oil sector for some time. “Our task, in addition to promotion, is also to defend, update, safeguard and indicate solutions for producers but also for consumer citizens”, he reports the president Massimino Magliocchi (in the picture).
Can the end consumer recognize and defend themselves from fraud, especially in the oil sector? Probably not, that's why it's also needed the help of the Consortium. Starting from an important premise: olive oil is very controlled and therefore with a higher degree of safety than other products. What to do then? “The very low prices of extra virgin olive oils are not a necessary synonym of fraud as is often believed. It depends a lot on the production chain,” explains Magliocchi. In the supermarket advertising flyers there is almost always a bottle of extra virgin olive oil at an extremely low price. “This way of selling, as well as putting producers in difficulty, increasingly induces consumers not to buy extra virgin olive oils which have a higher price”, adds the Consortium technically.
From here, pay attention to deodorization, for example. This is the final phase of oil refining and consists of eliminating unsaturated hydrocarbons, aldehydes and ketones, responsible for organoleptic defects. “It is done under vacuum, at high temperature and in a stream of steam, sometimes in nitrogen. And it is impossible for the final consumer to find out if his extra virgin olive oil has been mixed with a deodorizer”, they say. And then there “mixing of seed oils with extra virgin oils”. Many believe that to find out if there is seed oil it is sufficient to cool it: "there is no scientific basis in this", says the president. Nor should it be underestimated coloration , falsification of origin, that is, selling an oil that is not Italian as Italian. “If you don't do targeted chemical analyses, you can't tell the difference.”
Last but not least, the use of enzymes in the oil mill. “We are referring to the chemical ones that favor the release of the oil by acting on the pectin and on the walls of the cell membranes that contain it. These products, even if they improve the quality of the oil, do not create damage or problems, they are used in many other foods such as wine, for example, they are prohibited because the community regulation provides that virgin olive oil is obtained directly from olives and solely with mechanical processes, in order to maintain that concept of naturalness, of pure olive juice: they can only be used when the final product is a non-edible oil. In this case, it is really not possible to detect the fraud, not only for the end consumer."
Browse for free l'Olivo News click , here
