Why Olive Oil Prices Spiked

From the notebook

If your olive oil suddenly cost a great deal more over the last couple of years, you were not imagining it, and you were not being singled out. The cause was old-fashioned and brutal: the weather.

Olive oil is an agricultural product from a small handful of countries clustered around one sea. When drought and punishing heat hit the major producers — Spain above all, which alone presses a huge share of the world’s oil — harvests fall, sometimes by half, and there is no other hemisphere to quietly make up the difference the way there is for many crops. Less oil, same hunger for it, and the price climbs.

The honest takeaway is not a brand or a coupon. It is this: olive oil is not infinitely cheap, and when it is suspiciously cheap during a bad year, ask why. A real extra virgin in a drought year costs what it costs. A bottle that stayed mysteriously cheap may have stayed cheap for reasons that have nothing to do with generosity.