Olive Oil Culture History XI- From the Age of Enlightenment to the Present
16-04-2025
14:34
Photo of an olive pulp press based on a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.
During the Renaissance, especially in Italy, olive oil regained its value. There was a boom in its consumption in kitchens, cookbooks and generally in all areas. This process, which is described as the rebirth of the food culture defined today as "Mediterranean cuisine" in Italy at that time, has continued until today.
In the late 1600s, another production sector using olive oil began to rise: soap making. In the 16th century, Tunis would take the lead in soap making, then in the early 1700s, Marseille would become the capital of soap, and then Crete. On the island of Crete, soap making increased significantly during the 18th century, when Ottoman rule was well established. In 1723, the number of soap factories was six, in the mid-1700s it reached twelve, and in 1783 it reached eighteen.
Towards the mid-1800s, soap factories in settlements within the borders of the Ottoman Empire began to consume approximately 22% of the average olive oil production. Before these years, soap production methods were well known in the regions under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, as important soap factories were already active, especially in Ottoman Syria. The ancient city of Nablus in Palestine was particularly famous for its large soap workshops from the early 1800s to the 1900s. Since all of these workshops were transformed into foundations from which the families of the people who operated them benefited, they were protected from being divided among many heirs and thus from disappearing.
It is known that horses and camels were oiled in the stables belonging to the sultan and the sultan's palace in the Ottoman Empire, and that the olive oil resources of Lesbos were allocated for this purpose. In return for this service, ten monastery lands on the island were exempted from taxation, and it was decided that non-Muslims would not be taxed.
In the 1700s, French immigrants planted olives in nineteen settlements along the California coast, starting olive cultivation on the new continent. The widespread use of olive oil in American cuisine would not begin until the 1920s.
Starting in the second half of the 1700s, olive oil, which had been deliberately exposed to heat and light and "spoiled", began to be used in the dye industry. In those years, olive oil was an important export product of the Ottoman Empire to Europe through French merchants. Dye manufacturers began using olive oil - a technology that was clearly imported from the Ottoman world - in the production of the dye called Turkish Red or Edirne Red [macro dye]. The raw material for the color is the root of the rubia plant, and the dyeing process is laborious and long; it is a complex process that requires the fabrics to be washed in lye with olive oil, sheep manure and other ingredients multiple times, taking up to forty hours. In the 1700s, olive oil continued to be used in the processing of wool used for the imitation 'Tunisian bonnet' (fez), which was produced in different countries of Europe and exported to Ottoman lands. By the end of the century, after this market had gradually diminished, bonnets similar to fez became popular among workers in southern France.
There is evidence that table grapes were kept in olive oil to preserve them on the coasts of the Aegean region in the 1700s. It is not known when this technique replaced the mustard seed used for this purpose and what kind of a change it caused in the taste of the grapes.
With the industrialization era in the 18th and 19th centuries, industrial type, steam powered, oil and soap processing plants emerged on the scene. It became possible to extract the oil remaining in the residues of olive oil production with chemical and mechanical methods and use it in the production of soap or grease. The merchants who owned the facilities that produced fast and large quantities in the olive cultivation sector and who started to get rich by trading began to transform social relations. A new bourgeois class emerged, seeking to mobilize the people and capital needed for modern olive processing plants and soap industries. These merchants, who had economic dominance over the peasants and the power to impose their own conditions on small producers, created their own capital accumulation. For example, in Lesbos, when it joined the Greek state in 1912, there were one hundred and thirteen oil presses powered by steam power. The majority of the facilities in Lesbos were built by machine companies in Izmir.
In 1927, centrifugal technology, which is considered the pioneer of today's modern method of producing olive oil, the continuous system, was first used to produce olive oil, and is still used today.
Technological research on the goal of separating more oil from olives is still ongoing. With today's technologies, almost 95% of the oil in olives can be separated.
In the 19th century, between the two world wars, olive oil refineries began to spread. These were businesses that produced cheap olive oil called “refined olive oil”. Refined oil is less pure than natural olive oil when compared to mechanical pressing and centrifugation methods, and the oil obtained loses its “natural” characteristics due to the chemical methods used in its production. This development was implemented as an action to meet the olive oil needs of the increasing urban population and especially the low-income social classes, and is a production method bound by laws and regulations by the state. These developments are followed by illegal industrial frauds (adulteration; production of olive oil mixed with other oils). Whether an olive oil offered on the market today is adulterated or not can only be understood through laboratory tests.
Today's conscious consumers have a justified instinctive distrust of olive oil that has undergone industrial production processes and adulterated olive oil, despite the presence of reliable high-quality olive oil brands on the market.
With the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1958 and the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy, the final phase in the history of olive trees around the Mediterranean begins. Olive oil becomes one of the state-supported agricultural products. The first country to benefit from this policy is Italy, then Greece, while Spain and Portugal join the club in 1986. At the same time, European support funds help olive oil production plant owners modernize their technological equipment.
The increase in olive farming and olive oil production will increase the residues (olive black water, pomace) that emerge during the processing of high tonnage olives, and will cause people to realize the damage that this residue, which was discharged into nature -often into rivers- in the past, causes to the environment. After this awareness, policies related to the proper disposal of the residue in the sector are developed, and deterrent laws are put into effect. The wastes generated in oil mills are collected and taken to another business, thus creating pomace processing facilities. In these facilities, the waste material is reprocessed to obtain the oil called "pomace oil", while the final residue that emerges after the process is stored in pomace pools and an attempt is made to dispose of it without mixing with nature.
Today, government support for the olive sector has been seriously curtailed, and especially in our country, most olive producers have begun to produce at a loss. Despite this fact, the spread of olive groves and people taking ownership of their own olive groves have not decreased, on the contrary, they have increased. There must be more than one reason for this seemingly paradoxical fact; humanity has a history of thousands of years with olive trees and olive oil, and harvesting one's own olives and producing one's own olive oil probably creates a sense of satisfaction.
At the end of the 20th century, olive oil became the most sought-after cooking and raw oil, surpassing not only other oils pressed from seeds but also butter. Today's conscious consumers have a legitimate instinctive distrust of olive oil that has undergone industrial production processes and adulterated olive oil, despite the presence of high-quality, reliable olive oil brands on the market.
In the new century, where communication and access to information have become almost commonplace, conscious consumers have become more questioning and selective about their diet, the content of the food they consume and the functionality of this content. The concern for healthy nutrition in the public consciousness has only come to the fore in the last twenty or perhaps thirty years. Today, researchers working on olive science define first-quality natural extra virgin olive oil as a functional food.
In this sector where olive producers, technology and industrialists, international monopolies, property relations, merchants and consumers play a role, the symbolic meanings of the olive, albeit emotional, still continue to exist. The issues that need to be researched are not only how production technologies and the nature where olive cultivation is carried out can be improved. There are many noteworthy topics that can be discussed; the mutual relations of socio-economic classes involved in olive cultivation and the market, civil society organizations related to the sector, cooperatives, state policies, good agricultural practices, how olive oil trade processes are shaped in a global world market, raising consumer awareness, olive research and scientific research on the olive oil-health relationship.
Throughout history, the production and consumption of olives and olive oil in Mediterranean peoples has been the object of communication between agriculture and industry, between rural and urban, and this situation continues unchanged today. The sector is the source of income for the poor in both rural and urban areas, and the source of profit for producers, entrepreneurs and merchants. The dynamics between small and large olive producers and olive grove owners and propertyless poor agricultural workers, the class and interest conflicts between oil/soap business owners and intermediary institutions and olive oil marketers, technological innovations and the implementation costs of these innovations will be the elements that determine where this culture will evolve in the future.
Today, the historical details of the olive tree and its cultivation continue with paleo-ethno-botanical studies. Olive oil has become the focus of gastronomy and medical research. While scientists continue their research on transforming the olive into a more productive cultivated plant, they also continue to investigate the properties of the phytochemicals in olive oil and their possible positive effects on human health.
Compiled by: Uğur Saraçoğlu, Physician, Olive and Olive Oil Producer (ugisaracoglu@yahoo.com.tr)
During the Renaissance, especially in Italy, olive oil regained its value. There was a boom in its consumption in kitchens, cookbooks and generally in all areas. This process, which is described as the rebirth of the food culture defined today as "Mediterranean cuisine" in Italy at that time, has continued until today.
In the late 1600s, another production sector using olive oil began to rise: soap making. In the 16th century, Tunis would take the lead in soap making, then in the early 1700s, Marseille would become the capital of soap, and then Crete. On the island of Crete, soap making increased significantly during the 18th century, when Ottoman rule was well established. In 1723, the number of soap factories was six, in the mid-1700s it reached twelve, and in 1783 it reached eighteen.
Towards the mid-1800s, soap factories in settlements within the borders of the Ottoman Empire began to consume approximately 22% of the average olive oil production. Before these years, soap production methods were well known in the regions under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, as important soap factories were already active, especially in Ottoman Syria. The ancient city of Nablus in Palestine was particularly famous for its large soap workshops from the early 1800s to the 1900s. Since all of these workshops were transformed into foundations from which the families of the people who operated them benefited, they were protected from being divided among many heirs and thus from disappearing.
It is known that horses and camels were oiled in the stables belonging to the sultan and the sultan's palace in the Ottoman Empire, and that the olive oil resources of Lesbos were allocated for this purpose. In return for this service, ten monastery lands on the island were exempted from taxation, and it was decided that non-Muslims would not be taxed.
In the 1700s, French immigrants planted olives in nineteen settlements along the California coast, starting olive cultivation on the new continent. The widespread use of olive oil in American cuisine would not begin until the 1920s.
Starting in the second half of the 1700s, olive oil, which had been deliberately exposed to heat and light and "spoiled", began to be used in the dye industry. In those years, olive oil was an important export product of the Ottoman Empire to Europe through French merchants. Dye manufacturers began using olive oil - a technology that was clearly imported from the Ottoman world - in the production of the dye called Turkish Red or Edirne Red [macro dye]. The raw material for the color is the root of the rubia plant, and the dyeing process is laborious and long; it is a complex process that requires the fabrics to be washed in lye with olive oil, sheep manure and other ingredients multiple times, taking up to forty hours. In the 1700s, olive oil continued to be used in the processing of wool used for the imitation 'Tunisian bonnet' (fez), which was produced in different countries of Europe and exported to Ottoman lands. By the end of the century, after this market had gradually diminished, bonnets similar to fez became popular among workers in southern France.
There is evidence that table grapes were kept in olive oil to preserve them on the coasts of the Aegean region in the 1700s. It is not known when this technique replaced the mustard seed used for this purpose and what kind of a change it caused in the taste of the grapes.
With the industrialization era in the 18th and 19th centuries, industrial type, steam powered, oil and soap processing plants emerged on the scene. It became possible to extract the oil remaining in the residues of olive oil production with chemical and mechanical methods and use it in the production of soap or grease. The merchants who owned the facilities that produced fast and large quantities in the olive cultivation sector and who started to get rich by trading began to transform social relations. A new bourgeois class emerged, seeking to mobilize the people and capital needed for modern olive processing plants and soap industries. These merchants, who had economic dominance over the peasants and the power to impose their own conditions on small producers, created their own capital accumulation. For example, in Lesbos, when it joined the Greek state in 1912, there were one hundred and thirteen oil presses powered by steam power. The majority of the facilities in Lesbos were built by machine companies in Izmir.
In 1927, centrifugal technology, which is considered the pioneer of today's modern method of producing olive oil, the continuous system, was first used to produce olive oil, and is still used today.
Technological research on the goal of separating more oil from olives is still ongoing. With today's technologies, almost 95% of the oil in olives can be separated.
In the 19th century, between the two world wars, olive oil refineries began to spread. These were businesses that produced cheap olive oil called “refined olive oil”. Refined oil is less pure than natural olive oil when compared to mechanical pressing and centrifugation methods, and the oil obtained loses its “natural” characteristics due to the chemical methods used in its production. This development was implemented as an action to meet the olive oil needs of the increasing urban population and especially the low-income social classes, and is a production method bound by laws and regulations by the state. These developments are followed by illegal industrial frauds (adulteration; production of olive oil mixed with other oils). Whether an olive oil offered on the market today is adulterated or not can only be understood through laboratory tests.
Today's conscious consumers have a justified instinctive distrust of olive oil that has undergone industrial production processes and adulterated olive oil, despite the presence of reliable high-quality olive oil brands on the market.
With the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1958 and the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy, the final phase in the history of olive trees around the Mediterranean begins. Olive oil becomes one of the state-supported agricultural products. The first country to benefit from this policy is Italy, then Greece, while Spain and Portugal join the club in 1986. At the same time, European support funds help olive oil production plant owners modernize their technological equipment.
The increase in olive farming and olive oil production will increase the residues (olive black water, pomace) that emerge during the processing of high tonnage olives, and will cause people to realize the damage that this residue, which was discharged into nature -often into rivers- in the past, causes to the environment. After this awareness, policies related to the proper disposal of the residue in the sector are developed, and deterrent laws are put into effect. The wastes generated in oil mills are collected and taken to another business, thus creating pomace processing facilities. In these facilities, the waste material is reprocessed to obtain the oil called "pomace oil", while the final residue that emerges after the process is stored in pomace pools and an attempt is made to dispose of it without mixing with nature.
Today, government support for the olive sector has been seriously curtailed, and especially in our country, most olive producers have begun to produce at a loss. Despite this fact, the spread of olive groves and people taking ownership of their own olive groves have not decreased, on the contrary, they have increased. There must be more than one reason for this seemingly paradoxical fact; humanity has a history of thousands of years with olive trees and olive oil, and harvesting one's own olives and producing one's own olive oil probably creates a sense of satisfaction.
At the end of the 20th century, olive oil became the most sought-after cooking and raw oil, surpassing not only other oils pressed from seeds but also butter. Today's conscious consumers have a legitimate instinctive distrust of olive oil that has undergone industrial production processes and adulterated olive oil, despite the presence of high-quality, reliable olive oil brands on the market.
In the new century, where communication and access to information have become almost commonplace, conscious consumers have become more questioning and selective about their diet, the content of the food they consume and the functionality of this content. The concern for healthy nutrition in the public consciousness has only come to the fore in the last twenty or perhaps thirty years. Today, researchers working on olive science define first-quality natural extra virgin olive oil as a functional food.
In this sector where olive producers, technology and industrialists, international monopolies, property relations, merchants and consumers play a role, the symbolic meanings of the olive, albeit emotional, still continue to exist. The issues that need to be researched are not only how production technologies and the nature where olive cultivation is carried out can be improved. There are many noteworthy topics that can be discussed; the mutual relations of socio-economic classes involved in olive cultivation and the market, civil society organizations related to the sector, cooperatives, state policies, good agricultural practices, how olive oil trade processes are shaped in a global world market, raising consumer awareness, olive research and scientific research on the olive oil-health relationship.
Throughout history, the production and consumption of olives and olive oil in Mediterranean peoples has been the object of communication between agriculture and industry, between rural and urban, and this situation continues unchanged today. The sector is the source of income for the poor in both rural and urban areas, and the source of profit for producers, entrepreneurs and merchants. The dynamics between small and large olive producers and olive grove owners and propertyless poor agricultural workers, the class and interest conflicts between oil/soap business owners and intermediary institutions and olive oil marketers, technological innovations and the implementation costs of these innovations will be the elements that determine where this culture will evolve in the future.
Today, the historical details of the olive tree and its cultivation continue with paleo-ethno-botanical studies. Olive oil has become the focus of gastronomy and medical research. While scientists continue their research on transforming the olive into a more productive cultivated plant, they also continue to investigate the properties of the phytochemicals in olive oil and their possible positive effects on human health.
Compiled by: Uğur Saraçoğlu, Physician, Olive and Olive Oil Producer (ugisaracoglu@yahoo.com.tr)
Source:
1. Sending Olive Oil to Istanbul, Prof. Dr. Zeki Arıkan, Ege University Emeritus Faculty Member, Olive's Journey in the Mediterranean, Conference Proceedings, 2016.
1. Sending Olive Oil to Istanbul, Prof. Dr. Zeki Arıkan, Ege University Emeritus Faculty Member, Olive's Journey in the Mediterranean, Conference Proceedings, 2016.
2. The Journey of Olive in the Mediterranean; Conference Proceedings, Dr. Alp Yücel Kaya, Ertekin Akpınar, 2016.
3. Soap Works in Türkiye; Müge Çiftyürek, PhD Thesis, Department of Art History, Art History PhD Program, Pamukkale University, Institute of Social Sciences, 2021.
4. A Special Example from Turkish Cultural Geography: Turkish Soaps, Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University Social Sciences Institute Journal, October 2019, Dr. Güven Şahin, Istanbul University Social Sciences Institute, Department of Geography.
5. Natural Laurel Soap; Tahsin Özer, Fatma Zehra, Ali İhsan Öztürk, ALKU Journal of Science, ALKU Journal of Science 2021, Issue 3(2): 29-37 e-ISSN: 2667-7814.