Slippery Business: The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil - The New Yorker
"Yet extra-virgin oil is also easy to fake, either by combining some extra-virgin oil with another oil, adding colorings to it or simply mislabeling its origin" .... "Those practices are especially common in Italy"

Fraudulent olive oil brands taken off the market in 2006

Extra Virgin Olive Oil: Great to Taste, Easy to Fake - WSJ
"More sophisticated scams, like D.. R...’s, typically take place at high-tech refineries, where the oil is doctored with substances like hazelnut oil and deodorized lampante olive oil, which are extremely difficult to detect by chemical analysis."

Olive Oil Fraud Rampant As Demand Skyrockets - NPR
"Italian extra-virgin olive oil has become so lucrative that adulterated olive oil has become the biggest source of agricultural fraud problems in the European Union."

Feds seize Truckload of Fake Olive Oil - Boston.com
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration tested the chemical composition of the oil and found it was really less expensive soybean oil"

Murky Italian olive oil to be pored over  - Telegraph
"The labelling will also help to erase the common practice of marking olive oil as "extra virgin"." ..."A television investigation by RAI, the state broadcaster, tracked a load of olio di sansa, the oil that is extracted from the pulp after the extra virgin has been pressed, as it passed through Turkey." .."When the oil left the Turkish port on its way to Italy, it was certified as extra virgin."

Olive oil's slippery supply line - denverpost.com
"The newest scheme involves cutting olive oil with poor-quality hazelnut oil."

Extra Virgin Olive Oil - Are You Getting What You Pay For? - ABC News 7Online
"It appears as though it were at least 50 percent adulterated."

Many olive oils prove to be Italian in name only - Milwaukee Journal Sentinal
"For export, the factory even churns out an extra-light olive oil, a bland concoction that is about as enticing to a native Italian palate as bowl of SpaghettiOs."

"Snippets from the Italian Scene Olive Oil Fraud" - Italianfood.about.com
"it turns out that almost all of the Virgin and Extra virgin olive oil produced by large commercial Italian olive oil plants owes its certification to slight of hand of one sort or another. Much is olio lampante, which is made from olives that have fallen from the trees, are collected with huge vacuum cleaners, and pressed, at which point the resulting oil is reprocessed to make it palatable."

"of 73 olive oils ... in the U.S. Only 4 per cent were pure olive oil. The rest were adulterated" - FDA
"The FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has indicated that it doesn't like to see people mislead"

Beware of the cheap olive oil impersonator (Adulterated oils & distributors who have been caught) - cbc.ca
"But price-conscious shoppers who purchase low-priced olive oils have to be careful. Some products that look like bargains could be fake."

Algorithms for the detection of hazelnut oil in olive oil - Instituto de la Grasa - Sevilla, Spain
"The method allows the detection of low percentages of hazelnut oil in olive oil (5 %)"

Olive Oil Scandal - St. Louis Spine and Health Center
"Investigators have gathered evidence indicating that the biggest olive oil brands in Italy ... have for years been systematically diluting their extra-virgin olive oil with cheap, highly-refined hazelnut oil imported from Turkey."

Buyer beware: Crooks are deceiving you about olive oil - Capital Press
"Laboratory tests provided us with clear and conclusive proof that the oil that was being sold as "extra virgin olive oil" was actually 90 percent soybean oil." .... "Several distributors were informed that they were selling fraudulent oil and their reaction was a flippant "so what." .... "One of the distributors went so far as to explain that the product really was "imported from Italy," as the label stated, because the cans actually came from Italy."

When a price is too low for olive oil, it is a ransom price for seed oil - North American Olive Oil Association
"My customers [other distributors] knew from the price that I was not selling them 100% olive oil. The real crooks are the ones selling a blended oil for the price of olive oil."

"fraud, deceit, lies and scandal in the olive oil industry" - curezone.com - what to buy.. what not to buy
"Just because a bottle of olive oil is labeled "extra virgin" olive oil, there is no guarantee that it even contains olive oil. This deception is occurring on your market shelves right this minute."

German Periodical "Feinschmecker" Exposes Fraud in Supermarket Olive Oil - Olive University News
"Keep in mind that these refined oils are also sold cheaply. None of the refined oils sold as "extra virgin" cost more than €2.60 per .75 liter bottle ... this is under the production costs of true Italian "extra virgin". The cheapest "true" extra virgin compared in the same article was €10.00 per half liter for a Greek product."

Legislators in a lather over impure olive oil products - Taipei Times
"The legislators claim that oils labeled as "olive oil" produced by these companies are up to 90 percent mustard seed oil or sun flower oil, but are sold at a higher price because of the better reputation of olive oil. They also claim that the presence of oils other than olive oil are not noted on the labels"

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