foodmuseum olive exhibit

OLIVE Olea europaea
The olive is a small, oily fruit with a fairly large seed called a pit. Olives are an important source of healthy, tasty cooking oils. Native to the Mediterranean, the olive tree was considered sacred to people there as far back as the 17th century BC. The Greeks made the olive branch a symbol of peace. (HFHA Coll.)

According to Greek mythology, Athena won a contest with Poseidon
to see which god could present the most useful gift to mankind. Athena offered the olive tree.
It certainly proved useful. The ancient Greeks not only ate olives and cooked with itsoil,
they also used olive oil for lighting buildings and cleaning their bodies.
(This is a reproduction from the studio of Donatello. The original is in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Italy.)

Greeks also used the olive branch as a symbol of peace. The 2004 Athens Olympics uses the olive wreath as the symbol of the games, and winners wore wreaths of olive leaves.

Olives are harvested in the late fall.
This early 20th century Italian photo depicts a family outing for gathering olives from mature trees.
People climbed the ladders and shook the branches and the olives fell to blankets below.

These olive trees are more the standard height for modern cultivation.
Ladders are still used, but modern plastic netting has replaced blankets.

Here's a close-up of one type of tool used to hand harvest the crop. Other growers use plastic rakes.

Olives need to be processed for oil soon after harvest. Olives are crushed into a mush.

The mush is put onto mats..
These were formerly made out of jute fiber as shown here.
The press squeezes the oil out of the stacked mats.

Electrically powered modern olive oil presses use synthetic mats.
Much commercial olive oil production is filtered in giant centrifuges before being stored or bottled.

Crushed olive pits used as pellet fuel heat this French olive oil producer's home.