PC Olive Oil

I was at a local market last Sunday and bought some politically correct olive oil.

We have this bit of very seriously contaminated land in Amsterdam, the ‘Westergasfabriek’.  It was formally a natural gas processing plant, and they’ve all but given up on trying to clean the ground.  They’ve decided it’s just too contaminated, and since much of the contamination is underwater (well below sea level), trying to clean it up will only spread it.  What do you do when you have a piece of land like that in the middle of the city?  You build a park on it and call it a recreation area!  That’s what we now have, and one Sunday a month they have an open air market there.  It’s been growing in recent months, and now it’s quite large.  It’s always this strange mix of mostly hand crafts, mixed in with cheap plastic crap from China that sort of looks like a hand crafts.

Recently there’s been quite a lot of growth in stands offering food, quite a lot of it hand made or direct from the farmers, and it’s quite possible to get a nice lunch there now.  Or, if you do what I do, you can get a free lunch by working your way through all the free samples the different stands offer.

Anyway, I found myself trying to quietly grab a dried out piece of bread dunked in olive oil at the Groene Griek (the green Greek) stand, and I was caught.  Behind the bread and olive oil there was an eager sales woman, ready to talk with the people taking samples.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

“It comes from a Greek farmer you know!”, she said pointing to it.  “We put the picture of the farmer on the front of each bottle.  You know farmers in Greece are having a hard time right now, and it’s important to help them.  You know there’s a euro crisis, and they’re having a hard time selling their products for a fair price. When you buy their olive oil, we try to give them a fair price”.

“You see this one is Maria.   It’s an organic family farm, and at first they didn’t know who to put on the label.  They decided on the older woman.  She’s 72 years old.”

“If someone like you doesn’t buy oil like this in a market in this way, it won’t get sold as Greek Olive Oil.  There’s no direct market for Greek olive oil, and instead it gets mixed together with olive oil from other European countries, labelled as Spanish or Italian, and sold in supermarkets”.

“The big bottle is a recycled wine bottle you know.  It saves a lot of energy to recycle a wine bottle over melting the glass and remolding it.  It can just be washed and reused”.

I had to admit after tasting it, it was some of the best olive oil I’ve had in a long time.  They had some other kinds, but I decided on a wine bottle of Maria.  It was reasonably priced, and even though I didn’t plan on buying anything that day, I’m glad I bought this.  I wonder if that sales person realized how effectively she was pushing all of my buttons that day…  She probably did.