after the flood

on friday mehmet showed me more about olive oil production -- an old art, as old as civilization. when g-d destroyed the world in a flood, noah knew the waters were receding and that a new chance awaited when he sent out a dove that returned with an olive branch. this is how important olives are here.

we saw the very large and the very small of the olive oil world. we saw a factory that dwarfs mehmet's -- it is the size of a costco, big conveyor belts drawing crateloads of olives into grinders, pulverizers, shakers, clear plastic piping leading through separators and from there into stainless steel silos of oil the size of a tanker truck -- outside, one lonely garbage bin spewing white smoke.


then a factory in a tiny little village up a hillside where donkeys still drew carts through the streets, where they ground the olives up in a huge stone grinder such as you could toss a villain into, James Bond style, and from there the olive pulp got scooped by hand into big sacks stacked under a hydraulic press which squished them and let the oil run out the sides, where it was collected in stone troughs and carried into basins. spigots allowed leftover water to be drained out from under the oil which floated on top. after the bags were pressed, a boy my age removed the crushed olive gunk -- again by hand -- into a wheel barrow and, getting a running start, he pushed it up onto a huge olive compost pile outside, bigger than he was -- they used wood planks to let him climb up on top of the heap to. then he'd dump out the waste and go back for more.

it was a team of perhaps five -- their shirts, boots, fingernails, all encrusted with the stuff -- they wore army surplus pants. a white dog slept in the sun beside a chair, a bag of oranges, a knife and an ashtray.

we stopped as well at a third plant where there was also a museum of olive oil production machinery. big nineteenth century machines powered by steam.

today we used the factory kitchen to make breakfast -- poached eggs with sautéed dried red peppers, yoghourt sauce with garlic, and pizza toasts on bread that was hot when we picked it up at the store. i ground the garlic in a copper mortar and pestle. cheese, too, and rakis -- lion's milk. we used the industrial dishwasher to clean up. three minutes and we were done.