The olive and imaginaries of the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the olive tree and olive oil continue to seep into imaginaries of the Mediterranean. The olive tree, long lived and durable, requires human intervention to be productive: it is emblematic of the Mediterranean region and the longstanding human habitation of it. Long central to the religious imaginaries and practices of the monotheistic tradition and those which preceded it, olive oil has emerged, in recent decades, as the star of The Mediterranean Diet. This paper, inspired by anthropologists who follow the ‘thing’, also follows the advocates, both scientists and chefs, who tout the scientific research which underpins The Mediterranean Diet’s claims, which critics might consider part of contemporary ideologies of ‘healthism’ and ‘nutritionism’. Nonetheless, as I analyze, this diet with its olive oil star, and the forms of sociality which are imagined to be part of it continue to affect the circulations of olive oil, culinary practices, and people from and to the Mediterranean region.

KEYWORDS:

• Olive oil
• Mediterranean
• food anthropology
• circulations of commodities
• imaginaries

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Paul Silverstein for the invitation to participate in this special issue. A version of this paper was presented at the Semiotics Workshop at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 6 April 2017. Thanks to Briel Kobak, Costas Nakassis, and Michael Silverstein for their comments. Thanks to Ala Alazzeh for inviting me to present a version of this paper in Palestine at Bir Zeit University, 5 May 2017 and to Rana Barakat and Rema Hammami for their comments. I thank Bruce Grant, Paul Manning and Vaidila Banelis for their feedback. Thanks to Alia Yunis for providing me a link to see her remarkable documentary on olive oil, The Golden Harvest, in advance of its release. Research for this paper has been carried out since 2000, funded under various internal and external research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Kashdan (2017) for an insightful discussion of how Elizabeth David, Claudie Roden and Paula Wolfert who as cookbook authors with different connections to the region, were profoundly important to shaping the imaginaries of the Mediterranean. Thanks to Harry Kashdan, for drawing my attention to his lovely article and for our productive conversations during the Making Levantine Cuisine conference (Georgetown University, 8 June 2019).

2 This organic extra-virgin olive oil is from the Chauteau Miraval, the estate which they bought and on which they were married in 2014. It sells for 85 Euros for a 500 ML bottle, providing an apt modern day example of why olive oil was referred to as ‘liquid gold’ in ancient times, and why so many olive oil producers are anxious to have their olive oil certified as ‘extra-virgin’ as it can be sold at a much higher price. The olive oil will survive their marriage, it seems, described as the estate’s manager, Mark Perrin, as ‘an investment for the family and the children’ (Al-Zoubi, 21 March 2017).

3 This way of describing food still has a resilient hegemony; despite all the criticisms of it (see for instance the incisive work of Julie Guthman (2014) in University of California Press’ food studies journal, Gastronomica, special issue on Critical Nutrition, Fall 2014).

4 Three excellent contemporary ethnographies of contemporary American food have recognized how these scientific critiques of animal fats, particularly from red and dark meat, need to be part of ethnographic understandings of food productions, both industrial and alternative. See Striffler (2005) on the chicken industry; Weiss (2016) on alternative pork production; and Paxson (2013) on the American craft cheese industry.

5 For example, Sutton recounts a different role for olive oil and olives, and feta cheese for Greek students in England where they provide a Proustian memory of the beloved tastes of their home when they are longing for it (2001, 80).

6 This in her The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (Wolfert 1994). See Kashdan (2017, 9) for his reflections on Wolfert’s counterintuitive inclusion of Georgia in the category of ‘Mediterranean’.

7 This decades long practice is well documented in Rosenblum (1996), Mueller (2012), as well as in frequent recent articles in the Olive Oil Times.

8 Indeed, Gaza as a port in recent times has been a site of not a functioning infrastructural port for commodities (including olive oil) as it was once famous for, but rather now famous for the freedom flotillas for political activists trying to bring commodities to Gaza as relief for the Israeli severe restrictions on the circulations of commodities to the Gaza Strip (see Allan and Brown (2010/2011) on the Turkish Mazi Marmara, for example).

9 For instance, fair trade Palestinian olive oil imported into Canada is routinely stopped at the port in Montreal to be searched because there is no obvious slot for border officials to put it in. The importer is therefore charged an additional $1500 CDN for the search (Robert Massoud, Beit Zatoun, personal communication.)

10 For further detail on the entanglements of fair trade and solidarity networks see Meneley (2011, 2014a, 2014b). For a sophisticated analysis of the complexities of ‘fair trade’ see Besky (2014).

11 Squadrilli (2015).

12 A similar effect happened when a conference on Mediterranean food in 2010 was hosted at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. The papers from the conference, published in the special issue of Food, Culture and Society 2013, with the exception of one paper, were about Israel. Although the special editors Nir Avieli and Ravi Grosglik (2013) did not mention it, the difficulty of permits for Palestinians and those from other Arab countries to enter Israel, or solidarity boycotting as the conference was held at an Israeli university, may have been part of it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.