The Olive: Food of the Gods
Long before the olive was a snack or a salad oil, it was sacred. Civilisations crowned their champions with it, lit their temples with it, and went to war over it. Here is why the olive earned the title “food of the gods.”
No other fruit is so wound into the human story. The olive was domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean thousands of years ago, and from the start it was treated as a gift from the divine rather than just a crop.
Athena’s gift
The Greeks told it best. When Athena and Poseidon contested the city that would become Athens, Poseidon struck the rock and gave a spring of seawater; Athena planted an olive tree. The gods judged the olive — food, oil, light, wood, medicine, all from one tree — the greater gift, and the city took her name. Olive trees on the Acropolis were considered sacred, and to harm one was a serious crime.
Oil for victors, gods and kings
Olive oil anointed Olympic champions and was poured over the heads of kings. It burned in temple lamps and household ones alike — the original light of the Mediterranean world. The branch became the universal sign of peace, and still is: a dove with an olive branch, a hand extended. We did not invent that symbol so much as inherit it.
I find it humbling that something I spent twenty years buying and selling by the tonne was, for the people who first grew it, holy. The oldest living olive trees — like the 4,000-year-old tree of Vouves in Crete — were already ancient when those myths were written. We are very late to a very old story.
So the next time you drizzle a little oil over bread, remember you are repeating a gesture older than almost everything: the simplest blessing the Mediterranean knows.