Our Olives, Ourselves
By Dr. Alicia Colson
In Northern Ontario, finding olives in the grocery store, even the local supermarket is tough. More often than not, I lucked out finding those black shiny large ones in tins located near the tinned tomatoes, or green ones in jars for intended for cocktails or even in the deli section of a particularly large supermarket, if I could find such a thing. Photo by Melina Kiefer on Unsplash.
What’s an olive? It’s a fruit that grows on an evergreen tree.
Beyond that, your familiarity with it may depend on your cultural background or where you grew up. I spent part of my childhood in Portugal, so I’ve seen olives growing on trees and olive presses dating from the 19th century and well before. Portugal’s neighbor Spain is one of the world’s largest producer of olive oil. It produces 9,819,569 tons of olives per annum. Overall, the European Union is the world’s largest producer of olive oil, according to the European Commission.
I love eating olives.
I knew that the climate of Portugal is a stark contrast, olive-wise, to that where I trained and carried out archaeological fieldwork in rural Northwestern Ontario. Both have hot weather, but everything else is different, including the range of foodstuff available. In Northern Ontario, finding olives in the grocery store, even the local supermarket is tough. More often than not, I lucked out finding those black shiny large ones in tins located near the tinned tomatoes, or green ones in jars for intended for cocktails or even in the deli section of a particularly large supermarket, if I could find such a thing.
I usually ended up buying those tinned black olives, the type I often saw on pizzas or what’s called a “Greek salad” in that part of the world. Several restaurants in the area also served them as hors d'oeuvres or in puttanesca pasta sauce. In other words, olives were a specialty item there, not a staple as they were to me and had been around me in both Portugal and coastal Brazil.
My search for olives reflects where I’d grown up and lived, in warmer climes in Mediterranean and in tropical regions of the globe. I eat olives all the time, marinated in garlic and chile or in salads, sauces and so on.
From my first supermarket trip, I knew that my search for olives was going to be a tough one. Even olive oil was often sold only in small, very expensive bottles. Bananas were readily available (especially black ones, which make the best banana bread) and avocados and oranges, pricy in comparison to more southern towns and cities, often due to the freight costs.
Just as those fruits were stocked to meet a demand, I wondered if olives and olive oil would become more common or less expensive than they were during that period of my field research, between the 1990s and 2010s. People are increasingly following the so-called Mediterranean diet for its supposed health benefits (more on that to come), and the market for table olives has moved far beyond traditional peoples in Spain, Italy, France, Tunisia, Morocco and other Mediterranean lands, as well as areas of Western and Central Europe who have long eaten olives and used the oil for cooking.
According to Mordor Intelligence’s global olives market report, worldwide consumption of olive oil has increased during the period 2012-’13 to 2019-’20 had increased by 73 percent over the past 25 years. Sales of olives also increased internationally during that time.
Still, none of this means that they’re a common grocery or snack everywhere.
Olives’ Place in History
To understand where olives are going in the cultural lexicon, it’s important to understand where they’ve been. This is where my background comes into play.
Researchers in the genetics and archaeobotany (botany in the archaeological record) of the Olea europaea plant family supports the idea that the olive plant was domesticated in the Mediterranean region and that olive trees were used for human consumption of their fruit in the Levant.
The species experienced what’s called in genetics “introgression” from the wild olive populations in the western Mediterranean. The shape of the fruit changed, became longer and wider over time so it’s readily identifiable to us today in the 21st century.
This process of domestication, by people occurred in the first part of the fourth millennium BCE (4000-3600 BCE) at the same time as the grape, the fig and date plant as hunter-gatherers started to live in villages, to farm and plant gardens, which grew becoming towns, cities and ever-larger settlements. Paolo Giulierini, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Napoli, is quoted as saying, that this region of the globe has been involved with the development of the triad of three plants: the vine (grapes), olive trees (olives) and wheat.
“In the countries of the so-called ‘mezzaluna fertile’—mainly the Mesopotamia region, then neighboring countries such as Egypt and the Greek colonies—these three crops have always represented a source of wealth and sustenance,” Giulierini is quoted saying. “Somehow, they were the ‘first nucleus’ of what we now call the Mediterranean diet.”
The phrase Mediterranean diet refers to the traditional diet of olive-growing regions prior to the introduction of fast food, the consumption of large quantities of red meats and other practices resulting from globalization in the decades following World War II. Today there’s even a Virtual Museum for the Mediterranean Diet.
Back in Canada
It’s possible that part of why olives were so hard for me to find in rural Ontario is because they can’t grow there. The climate isn’t suitable, and these fruits and this plant never grew here. However, in 2012, 1,000 olive trees were successfully planted in the Fulford Valley on Salt Spring Island, the largest of the Southern Gulf Islands on the coast of British Columbia.
So why only on Salt Spring Island? Well, the microclimate in Fulford Valley enables the olives to survive through live the harsh winters. The Brauns, olive farmers, recognized the value of the microclimate in the Fulford Valley would be suitable for fruit-producing olive trees. More than 20 species of genus Olea exist in tropical and subtropical zones but only Olea europea L. produces edible fruit. They sourced their plants from California, where such trees grow. The Brauns realized that olive trees could only flourish in that West Coast valley.
Olives can grow in climatic zones classified by the USDA as zones 9 to 11. Northern Ontario, were I was trying to find olives for sale, is classified as one or another of zones 4a, 4b or 3. Olives are the fruits of subtropical evergreen plants fruit tree, the Oleaceae family and the genus Olea, which is indigenous to the Mediterranean Basin, far far away from Northern Ontario.
Obviously olive trees don’t grow in the subarctic of Northern Canada. People’s diets are influenced by their geographical location, their antecedents, their local and cultural identities and dietary choices. The scarcity of olives in the grocery store reflects the diets of those who live in this region, as well as those who owned the stores and best understood their clients.
The olive plant was domesticated in the Mediterranean region and that olive trees were used for human consumption of their fruit in the Levant. Photo by Lucio Patone on Unsplash.
But there is an odd twist in this tale. On one of my many missions for olives, I learned from one of the assistants of the local Safeway in Kenora, Ontario, that a group of people, in (faraway) Calgary, Alberta, decided what each store in the whole of Western Canada should stock and when such goods should be shipped to them. This group of individuals decided what was to be sold almost 1,000 miles away. My informant expressed his frustration that he was unable to anticipate local demand and especially, the needs of incomers from the Eastern Provinces, Winnipeg and Southern Ontario. Olives stubbornly remained specialty items.
Based on my extensive fieldwork exploring all of the local grocery stores in many of the small towns in Northern Ontario, I soon established that as far as the locals are concerned, olives are not a staple food but a specialty item. Most goods are grown and bought regionally. Olives do not, well cannot, grow in northern Ontario. But other plants such as green peppers, lettuce, chard, beans, carrots, potatoes, sweet corn, onions, zucchini and tomatoes grow well.
An aside here is that the tomato is frequently associated with olives, the Mediterranean region and specifically Italian food. It was Hernán Cortés, the Spanish colonizer who brought the tomato from the area that we now call Mexico to the Spanish Court in 1521. So, the Spanish brought tomatoes to Spain, where they were cultivated from the 1540s onwards and appear in recipes from what became known as Italy, in the 19th century, dated from the 17th century.
The Algonquian-speaking peoples (the Oji-Cree, the Ojibwa and the Cree) who have lived in Northern Ontario since the northward retreat of the ice most definitely didn’t grow olives; neither do the Metis.
The region’s more recent arrivals of the past 150 years reflect Canada’s deep connections in northwestern Europe. Ties to other regions of Europe grew as Canada gradually split away from Great Britain from 1867. From the last quarter of the 19th century Northern Ontario was settled waves by migrants so that those originally from France and England were followed by successive waves reflecting the long history of migrations from rural regions of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Central and Eastern Europe, , as well as regions of the U.S. and farther south.
So, poking about in the food aisles of grocery stores in Northern Ontario towns in search of olives tells us something strange is happening. First, local demand for olives is perhaps changing with the seasonal influx of American visitors who are increasingly consuming cocktails, as well as people ordering pizza with olives to signal that they’re worldly connoisseurs and migrants arrive from elsewhere. Second, olives are part of the trendy Mediterranean diet followed by people who are avoiding carbohydrates. Third, their availability is dependent on someone else’s ideas of their demand.
Intriguingly, whether or not olives are eaten can tell us a lot more about communities and their relationship with outsiders. The hard reality that the selection of the range groceries in the Safeway stores takes place in Calgary reveals that those making the selections presuppose that everyone, everywhere, will eat the same things.
Finally, the demography of the region is in ever greater flux as people are moving out: Northern Ontario is experiencing a net decline in population even while small towns around the globe have increasingly international populations.
The fate of the olive in Northern Ontario tells us another story. A cosmopolitan fruit, it was often special in many parts of the world, while for others, like me, they’ve always been a daily staple. Just so with the immigrants who come from places where things are done or seen differently, creating novelty, but borrowing ideas and business practices from wherever they can be found. Their contacts are naturally global, they invest in their own education as that can be carried anywhere. They share with the olive the ability to educate, to please our palate, nurture our health and, when accompanied by a glass of wine or beer, help to fend off the wear and tear of those long cold winters.
