Olive cultivation’s pipping grapes in Cape popularity

INOTICE more and more Cape farms are turning to olive cultivation and some farmers have even pulled up vineyards and replaced the vines with olive trees. I was told one reason for this is because nobody steals olives. On farms close to towns, grape theft is a constant headache. There are signs along the N1 near Worcester asking motorists not to buy grapes from roadside hawkers as they are stolen fruit. That shows you the size of the problem. Grape theft is an industry there.

I was told by one grape farmer he had a vineyard next to a busy road past his property where he never harvested a single bunch of grapes. Everything was stolen. Thieves arrived in lorries during the night with teams of pickers and stripped the vines bare.

The thing about olives is that they are hard and bitter in their natural state, so nobody swipes them. They need a lot of preparation to turn them into food (or oil).

This makes me wonder who first thought of growing olives, and why? Did some enterprising soul look at those bitter little berries and say: ”Hey, if I pick these and soak them in salt water for several weeks, then pickle them in vinegar they might taste quite nice.”

(I suppose the same goes for the first brave person who cracked open an oyster and said: “I think I’ll eat this little slimy little bit inside.” The gourmets of the world owe a great debt of gratitude to the unsung explorers of the food world.)

The olive tree is the oldest cultivated tree in human history and was planted even before writing was invented.

Olives were grown on Crete as long ago as 3000 BCE. There’s a popular myth that the goddess Athena brought the first olive tree to humans and planted it on the Acropolis in Athens. People say the olive tree that grows there today is a direct descendant of that first one. Olive oil was important to the early Greeks and Romans who used it for everything from cooking to lamp oil and cosmetics. It is traditionally used to anoint kings.

That’s all very interesting about olive oil. But all you do is crush it and the oil oozes out. It still doesn’t answer my question about the curious fellow who decided to turn an olive into a snack.

Or stick it on a tooth-pick as decoration for a dry martini.

Last Laugh

Freddie arrived all hot and sweaty after a long drive through the dusty Karoo and Koos invited him to sit on the stoep and have a cool beer. “There’s plenty of beer in the fridge,” he said. “Just help yourself.”

After a while Freddie came out clutching a frosty beer and remarked: “I see you keep an empty milk bottle in the fridge. What’s that for?”

“Ag, you know,” said Koos, “that’s for all my friends who are into this new healthy diet thing and they don’t take milk in their coffee any more.”