Here's How You Can Actually Tell If Your Olive Oil Is Fake

Olive oil fraud has been around for thousands of years. But as rising demand transforms EVOO into an increasingly valuable commodity and fraudsters find ingenious new ways of counterfeiting it, the reasons why your olive oil is probably fake continue to grow. This is why this fraud continues.

Surprisingly, Italy only makes 15 percent of the world’s olive oil. Even so, as The Guardian reports, it’s the second largest exporter of olive oil after top producer Spain, which dominates 45 percent of the global market, but with prices 60 percent cheaper than Italy’s.

That makes “Made in Italy” designations both highly coveted and highly falsified. As The New York Times warned,

“Much of the ‘extra-virgin Italian olive oil’ flooding the world’s market shelves is neither Italian nor virginal.”

So, wait, what’s going on here?

As Larry Olmsted, author of Real Food, Fake Food, notes, much of the oil that comes from Italy is bottled but not produced there. In recent years, countless undercover operations by the Italian police have uncovered massive scams in which tons of cheap, low-quality oils from Syria, Turkey, North Africa, and Spain are being bottled and sold as authentic Italian extra virgin to foreign markets. Among the biggest victims of this olive oil fraud is the U.S., to which Italy exports around 30 percent of its olive oil.

Watch this video for how you can actually tell if your olive oil is fake!

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