Killing trees for short term gain is just hatefully stupid.
This is "selling the last harvest before the storm" behaviour. You would think an olive stealing gang knew there was a smaller crop next year if you chainsaw the limbs of the tree off.
"I don't care" is awful. Analogies to the hive stealing in NZ come to mind, Manuka honey is so valuable, its frequently stolen by the same bike gangs which do meth dealing.
It is said that Solon, the most revered law-giver of Athens, made cutting an olive tree punishable by death. I've also heard that because of their slow growth, planting an olive tree is something you do not for yourself but for your children.
EDIT: one more bit of historical perspective. Myth says that Athena and Poseidon had a contest to see who would be the patron of Athens. Poseidon gave the gift of a saltwater spring (to which I guess the Athenians said, "uhh, thanks, I guess."). Athena gave the gift of the olive tree. Obviously Athens is named after her. So that's how much they valued those trees.
My family is Sicilian and I don't think people understand how much olive trees mean to us. We have family in Sicily and if you did something to harm their olive trees it would be one small step below doing something to harm a family member.
Some people keep saying this but I call plain bullshit. Israel is well connected internationally, it's rich, it's society is full of highly influential people with worldwide connections and it's supported by well-connected foreigners with even more connections in the highest circles.
The only thing Israel will reap is more fucktons of multi-billion dollar military contracts, more foreign investment and more economic influence across the board, while a few politicians and UN functionaries do some perfunctionary huffing and puffing as appropriate for PR.
Both Israel and Palestine were founded in 1948 by a UN agreement. That agreement gave Israel the right to exist at the same time as Palestine. Package deal.
Without the West Bank there's not enough territory to form a Palestinian state. The Palestinians are owed a state because they are the original inhabitants of the land - yes! they are descended from the ancient Israelities: https://nitter.cz/MiroCyo/status/1712258026881921287#m
Additionally, the 1948 agreement gave the WB to Palestine. Any subsequent border changes by Israel or surrounding "Arab" countries that violate that agreement are unacceptable if they're not accepted by both Palestine and Israel.
It's true that the Palestinian leadership has been reckless and stupid again and again, but it doesn't justify imperialism over their land. We don't have empires any more and Israel isn't entitled to one.
> It's true that the Palestinian leadership has been reckless and stupid again and again, but it doesn't justify imperialism over their land. We don't have empires any more and Israel isn't entitled to one.
You might want to take a closer look at the propaganda. I believe it’s “white imperialism” or “US imperialism.” Israel isn’t the empire.
There are still empires... France is still in Africa, the USA has a fancy new drone base in Niger to protect Europe's Nigeria sourced natural gas pipeline, not to mention Obama started incursions into 7 African nations. China plagiarized the USA Imperialist playbook from the 50s to the 80s and is currently implementing it in Africa to good effect, even created their own analogue to the imperialist and exploitative IMF and World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. An then you got Russia.
How is it colonialism? The UK defeated the Ottoman Empire at war and the land was their war booty. Then the land that was historically the home of the jews was returned to Jewish exiles.
There has never been a state known as Palestine, and if there was it would be them who colonized the Jews.
They are supporting Hamas with their propaganda efforts by weaponizing Hamas agitprop on tiktok to drive unrest, division and violence in western countries.
They were also trying for a lease on the Lebanese port that exploded, many think Mossad were the ones who exploded the fertilizer dump there.
China was also helping with facilities in Iran which mysteriously exploded (again thought to be Mossad).
> I've also heard that because of their slow growth, planting an olive tree is something you do not for yourself but for your children.
I believe that's said because the olive trees live for a long time (hundreds of years), not because they grow slowly. They reach maturity in less than 10 years, producing around 40 kg of olives, so if you are not very old you would probably see the fruits of the tree you planted.
"The good man plants a tree whose fruit will be tasted by his grandson" is a proverb I came across once about date trees. There are a few varieties of this for various precious trees which can take generations to bear reliable fruit.
> People are fucking selfish, short-sighted assholes.
Orcas kill great white sharks only to eat the liver. Your intestinal bacteria will kill you (and themselves with you) if they escape into your circulatory system.
There are many more examples of creatures being fucking selfish, short-sighted assholes. I guess it's inevitable when life evolves competing for resources, although we, as higher intellects, should know better.
> Your intestinal bacteria will kill you (and themselves with you) if they escape into your circulatory system
That's why you are constantly generating a mucus layer with extreme diversity of sugar linkages, so that they are fed without one bacteria being able to take over the whole area (basically taming them). If instead you try to eradicate them with antibiotics (i.e. nuclear bombs) then you will inevitably breed ones that will kill you.
I mean killing elephants and sharks is terrible but thats the only way to harvest those parts so its a bit different, its not like you could carefully remove them and they'd grow another set for harvest next year.
Yes, I had a small piece of a tusk for research purposes that was harvested from an elephant that had died naturally, there was a bunch of paperwork that accompanied it. Paper published here for those who might be curious: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/nn3049957
Yeah, if you've never seen one, take a look at a child's skull: it's freaky-looking. Most people have no idea because we don't normally see these, only adult ones.
That sounds like next years problem. If global mega corps already struggle with looking past the next quarter when it comes to consequences why would you expect people who are living off of crime to have a longer term view?
There are many factors at play here. It might be different levels of consciousness involved. Cutting down the whole tree is a bigger barrier and requires another level of ruthlessness.
It's going to bite them long term when people lose the habit of consuming olive oil as much because it's too expensive. Their mistake is treating it as zero sum
If they elect to take the long position, usually a crime syndicate will move in on the industry and capture it. That doesn’t mean they can’t also opportunistically profit from industries they aren’t interested in managing.
The price for virgin olive oil used to be 3-4 €/liter in the last couple of years and now it has soared to above 10 €/L. You can find some local producers (relatives/friends) selling for around 8 €/L but most people in the big cities will never see such a low price, on the contrary it will reach them for around 15 €/L :-(
Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal (among other Mediterranean countries) rely heavily on olive oil for food preparation and this will affect prices and inflation.
I was in Portugal a couple of months ago, and our local tour guide said the drought conditions meant we should expect to pay 3x the price for olive oil over the next year or two.
I was there ~2 months ago, near Faro. Our driver said they had had very little rain in the past 3 years. He showed us empty creeks and rivers, etc. And the area certainly looked very dry.
It looks like it rained quite a bit in the past month, though, so if that has turned things around for them, then I am very pleased.
Is there some cultural reason this won't drive people to alternatives and they'll just eat the cost? Food has got to be one of the most elastic things in all of human history with diets shifting wildly over short periods of time depending on what's available and affordable.
People who can't afford it have been using sunflower oil for lots of things, mostly for frying. Normal salads, on the other hand, is olive oil or nothing. Not counting things like Caesar's salad, "ensaladilla", ... and other that have special sauces.
The taste isn't the same, just as it's not the same the taste of a good olive oil from a normal one.
Pig fat has been on decline for a long time, but it's still used for some things. Butter is not that cheap, margarine isn't either, and it's not as good (in either taste or "health" reasons).
Olive oil is a staple in our kitchens, and things should change a lot before we stop using it. It's like telling Asian people to change and not use soya when it becomes expensive.
But you don't use that much oil as a condiment. I think most oil is used for frying, or other high temperature applications.
Traditional Mediterranean cooking uses olive oil for everything, and at high temperatures, to be honest, I think it is a waste as you don't get its characteristic taste. We once did a fondue with extra virgin olive oil (we usually use cheaper oil for that, but that's the only thing we had left), and we got essentially none of the taste.
I would imagine much like "truffle oil" - you can take a concentrated extract and add it to a neutral oil to get the same flavor. If it stays high for long enough I have to imagine someone will release a competing product.
Olive oil has a lower smoke point than cheaper oils so faking olive oil has been pretty easy.. I don't actually buy Italian olive oil since anyone who is faking oil internationally would be pretty crazy to make less by selling it as Spanish or Greek olive oil.
Perhaps, but unlike truffle oil, which people eat for the flavor (and prestige/faux prestige), many people choose olive oil for health reasons. If you make some other kind of oil taste like olive oil, those people would not buy it.
As far as I know those 'health reasons' are mostly propaganda and come from the new-agey sort of faux health circles. Correct me if I'm wrong I don't know much about the health of various oils this is just the impression I have gotten.
The ratios of different types of fats in oils (e.g., saturated vs unsaturated, mono- vs polyunsaturated, etc) do have different metabolic processes and effects, that's not any kind of new-agey or faux health stuff.
The level of impact of such things is definitely still actively studied, but some fats do generally seem worse for you to consume than others.
Now, anyone arguing eating a bottle of olive oil a week will cure your cancer is obviously full of it, but choosing different oils because of ratios of saturated fats and what not isn't entirely new-agey fluff.
Olive oil is substantially better than many other seed oil alternatives in terms of omega 6 content (too much omega 6 appears to be a problem, especially given how little omega 3 we get in the modern diet) [1] [2]. Extra virgin olive oil also has crazy high phenolic content for an oil, and polyphenols are well studied in their many beneficial impacts on health.
Oh aside from "Dr. Fabio"'s blog these are some great sources about the health benefits of olive oil. Good to know, ill have to keep eating it;)
I am somewhat shocked though to see such strong opinions about the health benefits of olive oil or the lack thereof. Here I thought it was just a tasty oil.
Just so you know, the burden of proof lies with the person making a claim, in this case you, claiming the health benefits of olive oil are 'propaganda'. If you think you don't know enough to make a claim, that's fine, you can always a nice neutral question, like: What are the health benefits of olive oil?
The notion that olive oil is one of the healthier fat options has abundant coverage in science and health media as well as peer reviewed research. This is widely know to people who are interested in healthy diet and lifestyle stuff. The claim that it's all propaganda requires a stronger burden of proof IMO.
If someone shouts "1+1=2 is propaganda!", the burden of proof should be on them even though almost everyone they meet will not have gone through the mathematical proof that 1+1=2 themselves (a 360 page proof, not an easy task). We're all just taking someone else's word for it + using our own common sense. We can find many other examples, but the gist is if something is well established in society, not just from cultural institutions but from educational and scientific ones as well, a claim that society is lying to us for whatever reason has the much stronger burden of proof.
> The notion that olive oil is one of the healthier fat options has abundant coverage in science and health media as well as peer reviewed research. This is widely know to people who are interested in healthy diet and lifestyle stuff.
OK.
> The claim that it's all propaganda requires a stronger burden of proof IMO.
Why? If it's so well known, then it should be trivial for you to prove!
The burden of proof is on the claimant, because that's the person who has proof to begin with!
---
> If someone shouts "1+1=2 is propaganda!", the burden of proof should be on them even though almost everyone they meet will not have gone through the mathematical proof that 1+1=2 themselves
The words "is propaganda" are carrying your entire point. The tricky bit is that there are two distinct things begging for evidence in your example:
1. The claim that 1+1=2
2. The claim that claim #1 is propaganda.
Each claim has (or lacks) a separate body of evidence. The burden of proof for each claim is whoever made that claim.
Importantly, propaganda itself does not require falsehood. Both the claim that 1+1=2 and the claim that mathematics are propaganda could be correct regardless of the other.
Because of that, any evidence that MeImCounting would be able to provide that "[olive oil diet] 'health reasons' are mostly propaganda" would fail to answer the pertinent question, "Are there valid health reasons for an olive oil diet?"
Olive oil is uniquely healthy compared to available alternatives. Mostly monounsatured fat, low omega-6. Polyunsaturated fats found in so-called vegetable oils are associated with nasty things, see https://www.zeroacre.com/white-papers/how-vegetable-oil-make...
I get most of my calories from fat and basically stick to olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, and animal fats to stay healthy. Olive oil has no healthy flavorful substitute that is liquid at room temperature.
Yes. They have considered it essential for good health since forever so they are reluctant to say 'sure we can make do with other oil'. More recently that belief has been spreading because the data seems to prove them right. This is driving prices up.
But Kirkland has a good reputation (deservedly? don't know) for authentic product labeling. I buy a lot of EVOO there myself, and think highly of the quality.
$8.99 a litre at TJs as of this evening, and TJs suppliers don't mess with quality because quality matters and TJs pays on delivery while all their competitors in the grocery biz pay net 30.
Years ago I read some theory that part of the social pressure to create early states with centralized power and militaries in places with grain-centric agriculture was about the ease of stealing harvested grain. By comparison, places that had root-crops which could be left in the ground and harvested as needed, thieves could not quickly/easily take a lot of value, so there was less need to guard resources.
The current article is kind of a reminder that the safety of crops / the difficulty of theft is variable with context; it's not just an attribute of the crop-type. If this continues, I wonder if we'd see tree-owners engage in something like tree-spiking, so it's literally unsafe to cut their trees.
I think this idea is also present in the work of James C. Scott, author of "Against the Grain". But I think he was talking about this in the context of it being easier for governments to "steal" grains (and just subjugate the farmers + general population), whereas other agricultural societies such as those in parts of Africa avoided this kind of societal dominance and large parasite/ruler/priesthood class by growing crops like yams that were hard to just show up and steal/tax in bulk. You could always just leave the tubers in the ground for a while and harvest on an as-needed basis.(edit for spelling).
I think especially when the first "governments" arose, but also now, the difference between "thieves" who visit you repeatedly and "rulers" can be pretty fuzzy, and is mostly a matter of perspective. But if some guys with weapons who are already in your extended community (perhaps your second cousins or something) run a protection racket and take 20% of your crop every year, but ostensibly protect you from roving/unknown guys with weapons who want to show up and take 80% of your crop periodically, then the presence of "thieves" justify the existence of "rulers" even if they're doing the same basic thing at different scales.
That's how it always starts! :) I think the origins of the state in agrarian societies is super interesting. Does it start organically (like you and your neighbors agreeing paying a small % for a security service) and then one day you blink and its morphed into a massive bureaucracy with royal granaries, armies, ziggurats and human sacrifices? Does a certain class of people step in and intentionally turn the system into one that primarily benefits themselves? How complex does a society have to be before that happens? etc...
The first year the Famine Relief provided by the British Government was better than anything anywhere else in Europe, (which was also affected).
The second and third years the pressure on the Treasury was such that Westminster wanted the rich Irish to also contribute, (Ireland wasn't subjected to the Income Tax being paid in Britain). The Irish refused and so in response Westminster dumped the problem of Famine Relief entirely on Irish local government, which was simply incapable to take on such a mammoth task.
(The reason why the Treasury couldn't afford to borrow the money required was that they had just recently borrowed huge sums of money to buy the freedom of all the slaves in the British Empire).
all that desperation IS a source of energy, granted the boundaries/gates/walls are administered in such a way to allow harvest... just (maybe toke up and) think about how mitochondria actually work. the 'energy' all comes from gradients of various sorts of presures (like the presure of hunger i.e. desperation)
This makes sense as nomads transformed by agriculture would probably be more interested in organized defense than offense (before prosperity, population booms and eventual land grab attempts.) Do you remember if this was a book?
I think I read an popular press article about a research paper, but I think books did end up being produced on the topic.
I don't think this was the piece I recall reading, but this recaps most of what I remember: https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/food--cooking/grains-tubers-a...
This is why China has so many walls, the first large agrarian settlements had to deal with a huge population of scattered nomadic peoples raiding them. You couldn't really take the offense to them because it would be like playing whack-a-mole but being nomadic they weren't well equipped to conduct sieges against towers and walls so that's what they did.
If you ever wondered where that bit from South Park came from with the Mongolians that's where. But spoiler Genghis Khan found a way around that problem.
>...But spoiler Genghis Khan found a way around that problem.
It was Kublai Khan who founded the Yuan dynasty.
>...After two decades of sporadic warfare, Kublai Khan's armies conquered the Song dynasty in 1279 after defeating the Southern Song in the Battle of Yamen, and reunited China under the Yuan dynasty
Believe it or not, the agrarian state predates China by thousands of years. It goes back 10k years to the early farmer migration into Southern Europe from the Middle East. And yes, I am very well aware of the Great Wall of China lol
Okay, so first thing I wasn't talking about the great wall. That wasn't created until the Ming dynasty which is after the period I'm talking about. And second I mean the first agrarian settlements in China.
>...Okay, so first thing I wasn't talking about the great wall. That wasn't created until the Ming dynasty
The most famous parts of the Great Wall were built in the Ming Dynasty, but stretches of the wall were first built centuries before:
>...Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC,[4] with selective stretches later joined by Qin Shi Huang (220–206 BC), the first emperor of China. Little of the Qin wall remains.[5] Later on, many successive dynasties built and maintained multiple stretches of border walls. The best-known sections of the wall were built by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
This has been a problem for years in Portugal too, but lately the number and the amount of stealing has increased dramatically. More like a coordinated organized crime.
Historically this was done mostly by some ethnic groups, I'm not sure if now there other forces or people behind it, as police forces have been more of less sleeping on this since it has been a "country problem" not a "city one" and as it has some ethnicities attached to it, the media also avoids to touch it, so the answer is: most of us don't really know what's going on in a deep way.
A note that food oil prices are going up because of the war in Ukraine, which has reduced the availability of sunflower seed oil significantly, putting pressure in the Olive oil supply.
In normal conditions, Ukraine would be the world largest producer of sunflower seed oil.
Let’s rule of thumb this and say production is half what it was in Ukraine (and assume nobody else has switched to edible oil crops and Ukraine doesn’t produce other edible oil crops, both probably false).
That means there is 1.1% less edible oil going around this year for that reason.
I think this is within the noise of good crop vs bad crop years, and edible oil is pretty elastic in use.
When you make it about just the numbers 1.1% difference doesn't seem like much, but you have to remember there's a complex network of producers, distributors and buyers fighting to make up that difference, the practical results of which can have other knock on effects throughout the network.
Also, to answer your question, sellers leveraging the shortage caused by the war in Ukraine is also a result of the war in Ukraine.
This is organized crime and the economical effects are devastating. It does not matter if the trees can regrow
The keyword here is diseases. Olive tree tuberculosis for example will easily propagate if you use the same pruning tool on different trees without disinfecting it.
This is not a joke. We are talking about estimated damages of 20 billion euro (with a B) that the European Union has been suffering just by Xylella fastidiosa, the "olive tree ebola" at a rate of 5.5 billion bleed each year since it appeared in Apulia Italy on 2013 and later on Spanish almonds in 2016. The disease can affect olives, almonds, figs, plums or cherries. It has 500 species of hosts.
Several new plagues entered inexplicably by Italy or Spain in the last decades. We should treat it much more seriously.
I don't know which is worse: destroying an old and beautiful tree that takes years to bear fruit, or selling olive wood as firewood. That stuff is $26-$100 per board foot, and is a gorgeous hardwood. It's hard to work and harder to dry, but the result is something special.
What you say is true but water management matters and this scarcity is largely self inflicted due to poor regulation.
The estimates vary but something close to 80% of water in Spain is spent on agriculture. You have large areas of Murcia and Andaluzia pretty much covered in canvas greenhouses.
A large fraction of this water for farming is spent producing year round tomatoes, strawberries, avocados, etc.
Much of these fresh produces is exported so it has nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with profit. Farmers are actively selecting profitable water intensive crops while externalizing the cost of creating water scarcity.
It's probably not. Regional draught conditions over multiple years is a common thing. The USA had very hot temperatures for a decade in the 1930s for instance and this is just 1 of many examples.
Climate change isn't really a local thing like this is. The region has had multi-year droughts many times in the past and will have them in the future too. Climate change could make them more extreme, to be sure.
But claiming that this is from climate change just does more to discredit it, and more-so the people who are climate doomers, than anything.
No they're not. The mere possibility of boatloads of money changes people, the act of having money changes people. Having billions of it changes people. People aren't similar when it comes down to money, because everyone's money situation is different.
Exactly, many people I've spoken with who have olive trees are saying this. The lack of rain and the high temperatures have played an important role to the production and yield of this years olives.
Imagine if the cave men alive during the ice age were also dumb enough to think they caused it. I'm all for taking care of the environment but blaming every environmental change on humanity is the height of stupidity. If this infuriates you and you think people like me should be rounded up because we don't drink your koolaid, you might be in a climate cult.
We're not blaming every environmental change on humanity, though? We're only blaming humanity for the ones we're probably responsible for. I don't see anyone saying we're responsible for plate tectonics (excepting the relationship between fracking and earthquakes, of course).
On a much smaller scale though, now we do it industrially. Burning all the fossilized old forests we can dig out of the ground - which is even worse because they were no longer part of the carbon cycle.
Wealthy westerners thinking climate change will only affect the global south are in for some hard lessons soon. "It can't happen here, it'll affect mostly the poors in the tropics, so we won't constraint capitalism at all for it or change our lifestyles," crowd think they're going to somehow outrun climate change. They don't realize as a group entirely dependent on exploiting the global south not only are they are risk if the gs is hurt, but their own climate is suffering now. If anything the northern West is more vulnerable to climate change than most due to it existing on a series of rube-goldberg machines in a long line of dominoes that, if hit in the right place, could cause systematic failure.
Olive trees are low stakes, but ultimately a sign that climate change is moving north.
Being self-contained is something the West is incredibly bad at, and has been for (checks calendar) at least half a millennium. Depending on how much you think counts.
Vertical farms are fundamentally less efficient than traditional greenhouses or open fields.
The main limiting factor for crop productivity is sunlight, and vertical farms drastically reduce the sunlight-to-plant ratio. They are only productive if substantial artificial light is provided, but this is very expensive. This is why vertical farms are generally limited to locations where land values are very high (such that it is more economical to artificially light crops than to simply grow on a larger plot of land) and there is substantial government investnebt to growing food locally, even though it is much more expensive than importing food. For example, we see veryical farms in Singapore because it is striving to be more self-sufficient for defense reasons in the event of war.
It is no solution for most countries, particularly countries that have rural regions suited to agriculture.
Let me know when they've figured out bananas, grapes and avocados. If/when the global south is crushed by climate change, we'll be back to eating what our great great grandparents were eating in winter. I hope you like potatoes!
> "It can't happen here, it'll affect mostly the poors in the tropics, so we won't constraint capitalism at all for it or change our lifestyles," crowd
Wow, my girlfriend and I visited Crete earlier this year and took a tour of an old olive grove. They warned us prices were going to jump up, but this is bonkers.
The biggest game changer is actually just using a cooking oil - there are plenty of alternatives that will have absolutely no impact on the final taste... and olive oil actually has a relatively low smoke point compared to other cooking oils.
If olive oil was just used for flavoring, emulsification and dipping bread in we'd have a huge over supply - too many people were raised on "Drizzle some olive oil in your pan before heating".
> The biggest game changer is actually just using a cooking oil - there are plenty of alternatives that will have absolutely no impact on the final taste...
I'm pretty sure I can taste the difference between popping corn in peanut oil vs. olive oil. In any case, I can certainly smell the difference which affects taste.
> and olive oil actually has a relatively low smoke point compared to other cooking oils.
I'm pretty sure I've popped corn with olive oil on multiple occasions without hitting the smoke point.
And for things like pasta sauces or roasting potatoes it's not even close to the smoke point.
There's also a fringe health benefit. Because high quality extra virgin olive oil is so difficult to find-- and so expensive-- relying on it as one's sole cooking oil essentially adds a tax to frying the hell out of all one's foods. This encourages healthier eating. :)
Tallow and lard are definitely excellent alternatives - but yea I was suggesting seed oils like peanut, safflower, sunflower or canola/rapeseed. Rendered fats have a weird reputation as there were health crazes that demonized it in the past but it's like most other oils - use in moderation... it's excellent to keep on hand though as it really makes a difference in baking.
You don't generally cook with EVO. EVO is what you use to dip your bread in but you don't necessarily want cook with it. Virgin olive oil or refined is better and has higher smoke points.
What's a plant-based oil that is a good refined (not EV) olive oil substitute? Coconut imparts a flavor, peanut is good but pricey, canola is no bueno for health reasons?
I guess these short term price spikes are to be expected as each industry establishes new hidden price collusion tactics to copy all the other industries doing it.
This is "selling the last harvest before the storm" behaviour. You would think an olive stealing gang knew there was a smaller crop next year if you chainsaw the limbs of the tree off.
"I don't care" is awful. Analogies to the hive stealing in NZ come to mind, Manuka honey is so valuable, its frequently stolen by the same bike gangs which do meth dealing.