
An article in The New Yorker by Tom Mueller (who went on to write a book about this problem) says as much as 90% of extra virgin olive oil from Italy is adulterated--Is not extra virgin at all. The article says the US Food and Drug Administration does not routinely test oils for adulteration. "My experience over a period of some fifty years suggests that we can always expect adulteration and mislabelling of olive-oil products in the absence of surveillance by official sources," David Firestone, an F.D.A. chemist who was the agency's olive-oil specialist from the mid-sixties to 1999, told Mueller.