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Extra virgin olive oil is the flavour of mechanisation | Aeon Essays

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Olive oil was revered and cherished by the ancients. But its distinctive peppery taste is really a modern invention

Few foods can compete with olive oil. Its salubrious properties have turned it into one of the most recognisable symbols of healthy living as well as a sign of tacit resistance to the industrialisation of food and loss of authentic flavours. Its rich history, stretching back to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians, plays an enormous part in its ongoing symbolic associations. Across a range of Mediterranean cultures, olive oil has been an inordinately versatile and useful product, even regarded as a means of connecting with the divine. Today, it sells in pricy green bottles that promise a…

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