Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Slow Food

Abstract

In recent visit to Korean greengrocer down street from my home in Toronto, I went to reach for Asian hot sauce, only to find that it had been dropped to lower shelf in favour of higher-end competitor: increasingly ubiquitous extra virgin olive oil. Indeed, hot sauce had all but been replaced with at least ten varieties of extra virgin olive oil, with fancy Italian labels and price tags to match, mimicking stock of expensive gourmet store across street. More than an average shopping crisis, this moment made me ask question of how olive oil, healthy fat, but fat nonetheless, could make such positive mark on public obsessed with fat and fitness. Indeed, well before greengrocers took up this trend, at one moment in not-too-distant past, butter seemed to vanish from higher-end restaurant tables, replaced by small dishes of olive oil. This move reveals kind of key shift in what Simmel (1994) would call sociology of meal, or perhaps, more aptly, sociology of hip meal. These scenes epitomize how commodity-extra virgin olive oil-can move across borders, in company of diverse cultural and class assumptions and practices. The study of these flows of olive oil illuminates wider issues of culture and class in commodity-saturated world of contemporary capitalism.As Stallybrass notes, Marx was concerned with a specific form of fetishism which took as its object not animized object of human labour and love but evacuated non-object that was site of exchange (1997:187). Relations between subjects in capitalist production come to be misapprehended as relations between objects. This misapprehension, as has often been noted, is real in its consequences, erasing connection between producers and consumers. In what Harvey calls the condition of postmodernity, world's geographies are being brought together via circulation of food commodities to be experienced vicariously and simultaneously as simulacrum yet social relations of production, producers and place of origin of these commodities are still erased from view of consumer (1990: 300). However, what makes Tuscan extra virgin olive oil such successful commodity is its craft or non-industrial production; location of production, producer's estate, remains embedded in product. In this respect, source identifying indexicals1 of craft production, seem to seek to overcome fetish. Extra virgin olive oil is, at least rhetorically, de-fetishized in that identity of producer remains immanent in product.As Mintz (1985) argues, making of dominant commodity depends on markets of consumers-the cultivation of particular tastes-as well as production. Is consumption of extra virgin olive oil an example of consumers' resistance to erasure of producer that so vexed Marx? Italian extra virgin olive oil producers produce, package and market their oil in ways that are not unrelated, I argue, to way in which North American consumers imagine and desire it. As well as investigating how extra virgin olive oil is produced and marketed in Tuscany, I consider how consumer imaginings and consumer movements might affect way in which production of food commodities is carried out. I focus specifically on an international movement, Slow Food, which advocates, instead of harried intake of industrial fast food, leisurely consumption of artisanally produced food.Commodities on DisplayOn my way to Italy to interview extra virgin olive oil producers, I used stopover in London to visit Harrods' famed food floor, in hopes of gaining insight into how Italian extra virgin olive oils are marketed abroad. I found four substantial olive oil displays. One four-tiered display drew my attention. Although Harrods brand of olive oil was given prestige place at eye level, estate oils from Tuscany immediately followed it. Greek, Spanish and South African olive oils were on lower tier; and, lowest of low, at my feet, mass-produced oils, like Fry Light cooking spray and Mazola corn oil. …