What does DOP mean? Controlled Designation of Origin. With this term, the State wanted to introduce a brand to protect consumers from food fraud, guaranteeing the genuineness of a product. The quality of an oil depends on many factors: have you ever wondered why there are extra virgin oils on the market at a very low price? I will try to explain the most banal reasons. Let’s say right away that extra virgin olive oil is the most adulterated and adulterable product on the market. Chemically, it is very simple to make a non-extra virgin olive oil or seed oil: it is sufficient to reduce the seeds to a powder, extract an odorless and tasteless fatty liquid, eliminate the chemical substance and flavor and perfume it with chlorophyll and laboratory products. Just as it is very simple to “recover” and make expired oils marketable: a typical fraudulent behavior is, in fact, to add seed oil to old oils; just as it is possible to chemically correct old oils that would otherwise simply be taken to landfill.
That said, the quality of extra virgin olive oil depends a lot on latitude and altitude. The best extra virgin olive oil is the Italian one: this is what the Good Lord decided and no one can do anything about it! But a question arises spontaneously: where can you get so much oil if production is limited and in recent years has further decreased, as a result of climate changes that have led to an increase in the infestation of the olive fly? The answer is simple: from abroad, where there are not all the controls that there are in Italy.
Furthermore, it must be said that to obtain a truly good DOP oil , not only is it necessary to avoid the use of insecticides and fungicides, but it is also necessary to favor the right times and methods of harvesting, which are regulated in the DOP specifications. In several countries, large producers, to significantly reduce the times, instead, the olives are harvested with aspirators, which, obviously, suck up everything, and then postpone the sorting to a later time! Far from the umbrella collector that I used to avoid crushing even one olive! I invite you to take a look on the internet to see the videos of the oil seized, fortunately, by the Guardia di Finanza, when, in Italian ports, it is unloaded from tankers into tankers. In this regard, thank God, today it is mandatory to indicate on the bottles where the olives were grown; out of curiosity, you can take a trip to the supermarket to notice how many brands of extra virgin olive oil, very well-known, still display the brand “produced in Italy with Italian olives”.
The DOP mark finally guarantees the production chain, giving credit to those who work seriously: you can very well choose to buy a non-Italian oil, but the consumer must know it and must spend less! A good extra virgin olive oil cannot cost less than 14-15 euros per liter, thus recognizing the right value to the product, the labor employed, the raw materials used and also to the bottle, with an anti-refill cap and explanatory label, adopted in compliance with current legislation.
