black gold

I'm not talking Texas Tea, either.


The olive harvest is over. After four weeks of abusive pruning, the trees have been stripped of their fruit. It seems these trees just can’t catch a break. For starters, they must grow in this hot, arid climate and chalky clay soil. Our inexpert pruning techniques of thwacking the suckers from the trees must also be painful. And finally, the harvest itself is a truly violent occurrence. After carefully spreading a long, wide net of fine mesh around the trunk and beneath the boughs, we set about the tree with long wooden poles,
beating the olives from the branches. We harvest as many twigs and leaves as we do fruits, and have to pick them out by hand before we can collect the small round olives into the wagon. For all this work, I have yet to learn how much oil comes from pressing. A fellow WWOOFer told me that the olives are about fifteen percent oil by weight. I will never look at the little bottle of oil in the supermarket the same way again.

I’ve gleaned a little about the process by which these small black fruits become oil. We’ve taken our olives to the only mill in the area that still processes them in the “old way,” according to our host, and uses no chemicals to extract the oil, nor do they mix all the olives they receive, thus reducing the quality of the resulting oil (apparently the olives that grow here are famous in the region). Here, the olives are washed and then ground up, pit and all. The resulting pulp is mixed with some water and may be allowed to settle overnight, or immediately be sent for pressing. If allowed to set, a small bit of oil (about 7% of the 15% of the fruit that is oil) will rise to the top of the slurry. This liquid treasure is much sought after, and apparently isn’t ever for sale because there is so little of it. It is the purest olive oil, having not experienced any denaturing heat from even the cold press. My host hopes to collect some before everything is pressed. When the paste is ready to be pressed, it is spread over round woven mats and these are stacked in several layers. The weight of the olive pancakes already begins to express some liquid, and it is collected in the pan that the mats are stacked in. After enough are stacked, the pile is pressed by a hydraulic pump at a pressure of up to 400 kilograms per square centimeter (about 5,689 pounds per square inch)! This is, apparently, low-pressure to avoid producing heat that damages the oil. All the liquid expelled is collected in a vat and again allowed to settle. Here, it separates by weight into olive pulp, water, and oil. From this point, the oil is either skimmed off the top or the vat is drained from the bottom until only the oil remains. The World Book Encyclopedia tells me that modern industrial processes involve further extraction using a chemical solvent that is applied to the pulp that remains from squeezing. This mix is separated by a centrifuge and the solvent is evaporated from the oil that is left, but this oil is generally flavorless and has lost much of the color and nutrients of the cold pressed oil. I think this is the cheapest variety that can be bought in grocery stores.

We were three Americans, four Poles, and one Irishman doing the harvesting. I guess we could classify ourselves as migrant workers, foreigners following the harvest, providing cheap labor for an expensive product that the local people take for granted. According to Susan Griffith in Work Your Way Around the World, 5,000 to 6,000 workers from Morocco and Latin America pass through Southern Spain every year to work in the fruit and vegetable harvests. The large number of Moroccans that enter the country have prompted the government to highly regulate the hiring of foreign workers. Prospective workers often have to provide several layers of documentation and employers must go through a lengthy and costly process in order to obtain visas and work permits. In many cases, (like mine) these fiery hoops are ignored altogether and workers are hired undocumented, being able to obtain neither a residence card nor a national insurance card, which aid in receiving social services.

This reminds me of the situation in the United States, where we are arguing over legislation that would either make entry easier for foreign workers in order to ensure availability of services, or further restrict legal entry, allowing exploitation and dangerous working conditions. Or perhaps the idea is to allow for cheap labor at a lower risk. I can’t remember.

Even from the position I’m in now, a foreigner here with no documentation and little knowledge of the language or the culture, I can’t identify with what these people must experience. I have travel insurance and can leave whenever I want, having money saved just for this experience. I’ve joined an international organization and made a deal with my host in which I have set and fair hours to work in exchange for food and lodging—security. The Polish folk working alongside us had a slightly different perspective, however. They, too, belonged to an organization that had placed them here and provided a bit of a security net. However they had even less knowledge of Spanish than me, and were traveling in order to escape the dearth of jobs in Poland. According to them, unemployment is very high in Poland right now, and it’s common for young people to leave the country to look for opportunities elsewhere.

So: olives, oil production, migrant workers, and social issues. I guess I am learning something in Spain.