Do you know your Filippo Berio from your Napolina; Belazu from Tesco’s own? Whatever your taste in olive oil brands, you cannot fail to have noticed how eye-wateringly expensive what Homer called “liquid gold” has become. It’s no longer a metaphor: olive oil has become the common food product that has increased most in price during the cost-of-living crisis. It has almost completed a cyclical journey from exotic health product to everyday foodstuff and back to luxury item.
One of my earliest life memories concerns, bizarrely, olive oil. I was at the Croydon Sainsbury’s check-out tills in the days when supermarkets believed “every little helps” and had bag packers to help people like my Ma, a single mum with two primary school children to wrangle. The packer said: “Ooh, olive oil, is that healthy for you? What do you put it on?” My bewildered Italian Ma simply replied: “everything”. Ma started to hide the olive oil, like the bottles of Chianti she bought too, in case people thought we were “posh”.
Although olive oil was mentioned in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) as an item to prevent fermentation in salads and “flatulence” in humans, it was Elizabeth David’s iconoclastic A Book Of Mediterranean Food a century later that reintroduced a foodstuff that was largely absent from British shelves.
David told us we could find olive oil in chemists, which my Ma confirmed was true when she first arrived here in the 50s. Some Britons rubbed it through their hair in pre-perm days. I remember watching my Italian aunt massaging it into her skin as a moisturiser. The physiologist, Ancel Keys, and his biochemist wife, Margaret Keys, wrote the seminal How To Eat Well And Stay Well in 1951, which first advocated olive oil as a crucial element in the Mediterranean Diet.
But it wasn’t until the 1995 River Café Cookbook and the first Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson television series in the late 90s that olive oil really became mainstream in the UK. It moved beyond upmarket delicatessens and onto supermarket shelves across the country. As more of us holidayed in the Med, we embraced the amber nectar: UK sales rocketed from 6,800 tonnes in 1990 to an expected 58,400 tonnes in 2024.
Over years, it became an increasingly affordable kitchen staple. Today, we have hit a crisis point: supermarket prices for the average bottle have risen by 89 per cent in the past two years.
Poor harvests, extreme droughts and high interest rates have sent producer prices soaring. Reduced spring rains have resulted in falls in both the quality and quantity of oil from countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. World production has fallen – hence the dramatic price increases that have resulted in bottles now being locked up on shelves like alcohol.
The rise and fall of olive oil as an affordable UK shopping basket staple is a reflection of our ongoing problems with sustainability. Although olive trees have been with us with millennia, producers cannot keep up with global demand. Perhaps the answer is to switch to disappointingly bland alternatives like rapeseed oil, which are more sustainable than some other oil alternatives.
Certainly the trend towards using olive oil to cook with, rather than as a dressing, may be over for all but the wealthier – just as it was 50 years ago. Either way, that much maligned air fryer is now looking like a sensible investment.