I was pottering around in wholefood store SoundBites in Derby – a brilliant shop that deserves to be a blog topic in its own right so I’ll definitely write about it in more detail soon.
Anyway, I spotted a wicker basket filled with little gold cans of olive oil, with several homemade signs telling shoppers that this was organic extra virgin oil made by a small community partnership set up by two Spanish families. SoundBites had also displayed a photograph of one of the project’s olive groves.
Now anyone who regularly buys olive oil will know that the organic, extra virgin stuff can be pricey. Although you can get it for around £2.50 it is more often closer to £5-10 and can go up to about £25.
So I was expecting the little Spanish cans to be a bit extravagantly priced and was pleasantly surprised to see that one 50cl can (about 500ml) was £3.49. Pretty good value I thought – so I bought one.
Already I felt happy with my olive oil because the display in the shop had told me quite a bit about where it was from. More often than not it’s extremely difficult to find out where supermarket produce is sourced. A quick look on Tesco website shows that they offer a 500ml bottle of own-brand organic extra virgin olive oil for £2.48 but it doesn’t say anything about where the oil is from – merely that it is “superior category olive oil obtained directly from olives and solely by mechanical means”.
How clinical.
I decided to check the Waitrose website to see if it could do any better. After all, Waitrose is known for being the supermarket that specialises in finer foods. I found its own brand Italian extra virgin olive oil at £3.72 for 500ml, but again the only description was “superior category olive oil obtained directly from olives and solely by mechanical means”. Exactly the same as Tesco.
To be fair both Waitrose and Tesco do offer other brands of organic oil, but the price spirals and there’s not much more detail (online anyway) about where they are from.
In contrast the information on the can of the Benizalte olive oil I’ve bought from SoundBites tells me that its made in the Alpujarra region, between Granada and Almeria, which is apparently famous for its olive trees, and there’s a website for more details.
I log on and it turns out there’s a lovely story behind my oil – two Spanish families bought an abandoned farm, rebuilt the stone buildings and started using traditional methods to grow their own olives and produce the oil, which they’ve now been doing successfully for 20 years.
The olives are hand-picked and pressed at the local organic mill.
The website also tells me about the region, where apparently some of the olive trees are over 100 years old, and about the local farmers’ group, the Flor de la Alpujarra Cooperative, which has 47 members aiming to preserve the biodiversity of the area and look after the mill.
It even goes in to detail about how the olives are picked, with farmers climbing into the trees and knocking olives onto nets with sticks, or picking each individual olive by hand.
After all this research I’m pretty chuffed that for an extra quid (compared to the price of Tesco’s comparable own brand) I’ve been able to support these Spanish farmers and I’m looking forward to testing out the oil.
And this, I think, perfectly displays the beauty of this kind of shopping – discoveries that you rarely make in the supermarket.
For more information on Benizalte olive oil visit www.almaorganics.com.
For SoundBites go to www.soundbitesderby.org.uk
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