is a historian and sociologist of science and the Thomas M Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Algorithmic Modernity (2023), co-edited with Morgan Ames, and Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity (2023).
Few foods can compete with olive oil. Its salubrious properties have turned it into one of the most recognisable symbols of healthy living as well as a sign of tacit resistance to the industrialisation of food and loss of authentic flavours. Its rich history, stretching back to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians, plays an enormous part in its ongoing symbolic associations. Across a range of Mediterranean cultures, olive oil has been an inordinately versatile and useful product, even regarded as a means of connecting with the divine. Today, it sells in pricy green bottles that promise a ‘Mediterranean’ lifestyle. And yet, the distinctive flavour of extra virgin olive oil is a modern invention. The trail of its peppery note leads straight to the core of the Industrial Revolution and the reinvention of olive oil as a global commodity.
Homer calls Odysseus polytropos, a man of many ways, who can transform himself and adapt to any situation. Olive oil is often involved in these transformations, as when, on his return to Ithaca, Odysseus relies on olive oil – and Athena’s intervention – to become younger, stronger and more beautiful. He also carved his wedding bed in an olive tree that had grown deeply into the ground. These references are not incidental: the olive tree and the juice of its fruit are ancient symbols of vitality and rootedness. In Mediterranean cultures they signify adaptation, gnarly endurance and endless transformative possibilities.