California Senate Sets Up an Olive Oil Subcommittee
The California Senate has created a Subcommittee on Olive Oil Production and Emerging Products, under its agriculture committee, and named Senator Lois Wolk of Davis to chair it. A state legislature setting up a subcommittee for one crop sounds like small news. For an industry that supplies about one percent of the olive oil Americans use, it is a foothold. Here is what it is for and what the growers want from it.
What was announced
The subcommittee sits under the Senate Agriculture Committee and its first focus is California olive oil. Its brief is to identify growing agricultural products, look at competitive practices in their markets and find ways to build the industry and consumer awareness. Senators Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa and Doug La Malfa of Richvale join Wolk on it.
Wolk’s district takes in Davis, home of the UC Davis Olive Center, whose director Dan Flynn welcomed the move. So did the California Olive Oil Council, through board member Bruce Golino. Wolk described olive oil as a green industry with a heart healthy product and said the state’s Mediterranean climate suits it.
What the growers are really asking for
Read the statements from the industry and the subject changes from encouragement to enforcement. Brady Whitlow of Corto Olive said the California industry is under assault from European producers flooding the United States with cheap and frequently mislabeled oils. Gregg Kelley of California Olive Ranch asked for a level playing field. Joe Muller of Copper Hill put it in five words: require truth in advertising.
That is the same argument Californian growers have been making since the UC Davis tests of supermarket oils last summer, and it has a commercial engine behind it. California plantings have expanded fast, much of it in high density groves harvested by machine, and those growers need shelf space that is currently held by imported brands selling at prices they cannot match.
| What they say | What they want |
|---|---|
| Imported oil is often not extra virgin | Testing and enforcement of grades |
| Consumers cannot tell the difference | Labeling rules and consumer education |
| The playing field is not level | State standards with teeth |
How much weight it carries
A state subcommittee cannot set a national standard. Olive oil grades in the United States are federal and voluntary, and imports are a matter for Washington. What a state can do is write rules for oil sold or produced within it, hold hearings that put testing results on the record, and give an industry a place to be heard. California has done this before: the state senate approved new olive oil grade rules in 2008, and Californian growers have been going after mislabeled imports since at least 2007.
The useful part for the rest of us is the hearings. When an industry is asked to justify its claims under oath, or at least in public, the numbers that appear tend to be better than the ones in press releases. If the subcommittee does its job, we should learn something real about how much oil California makes, what it costs to make and how much of the imported product actually meets the grade on its label.
Standards campaigns are never only about consumer protection, and it does not make them wrong. The producers pressing hardest for strict grade enforcement in America are the ones whose oil is fresh enough to pass easily, which is a fair advantage honestly earned. Just remember that a rule written to catch tired imports also catches a Californian bottle that has sat in a hot warehouse, and the serious growers know it, which is why the ones who push for testing tend to be the ones already testing themselves.
Sources
- Olive Oil Times, California Senator Wolk to Chair Subcommittee on Olive Oil Production
- Olive Oil Times, Quality Olive Oil a Taste Not Yet Acquired by Most Consumers