If you think you’re cooking with Olive Oil, you better be sure!

When it comes to olive oil, I get serious. I mean I am from the Mediterranean/middle east region where my ancestors ate a lot of olives, and thus a lot of olive oil.

So while my Italian brethren think that they cornered the market on olive oil connoisseurship it's actually we Middle Easterners who own the patent. Therefore I can say pretty authoritatively that I know a good olive oil when I see one, (or taste one.)

Thus, it was particularly humiliating/confusing when I recently purchased a container of a different brand of olive oil that I was completely unfamiliar with. Granted, I did not have my reading glasses on and therefore relied only on the color of the bottle and the label to seduce me into purchasing it. It had a fancy-schmancy Spanish style brand-name so I figured I could probably trust it's authenticity. Boy was I wrong.

I get the bottle home, open it up all ready to grace my salad with it's green gold goodness, when I noticed what I would call a "non-odor" coming from the container. By that I mean it did not smell Olive-y. At all!

I thought since I had a slight cold, maybe my smell mechanism wasn't working that well so I called my son over to give it a whiff. He smelled. Also nothing. In the interest of comparison I brought over the remains of the bottle that I had just used up. Just bringing that bottle near my nose was enough to emit that sweet tart yummy smell that only olives can impart. I said to myself, "Something doesn't smell right. Literally."

Again, without my glasses, I needed to rely on my sons 17-year-old eyesight to do the detective work. I said "read this label!" the letters were impossibly small. And there it was for all the world (at least those of us with our glasses on) to see: 80% COTTONSEED oil 20% olive oil.

What?? How can this be? The lovely green color of the bottle, the "extra virgin olive oil" printed boldly on the label in an Iberian looking font? The very artistic print of pretty olives gracing the front? I had been duped.

So it turns out that from now on I check the ingredients, because apparently even with a pretty Spanish name you can get away with fooling a plain old American girl like me. The great olive oil caper of 2016 has been busted open, and I'm not going to stand by and watch it happen to you, or your loved ones.

The offending bottle is pictured above. Cottonseed oil. My grandmother is turning in her grave.

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