The Olive Harvest

People complain a lot about the weather in Minnesota. The winter is bone-crunching cold, the summer is like a sauna with mosquitoes, and spring and fall each last about a week. Say what you will, at least Minnesota has seasons. When I moved to California (the “I” here being Tom; it’s time again for another guest-blog), I thought that there were no seasons. I was wrong on that. The San Francisco summer is windy and chilly, the winter is rainy and chillier, and the spring and fall are both sunny and warm. The seasons in Rome are kind of a mix of both. We arrived at the tail end of the extreme heat of summer, which has since been fading gradually. The temperature most days seems to be in the 50s or 60s (but sure to drop further), and the winter rains have just begun. It’s kind of like going from a Minnesota summer to a San Francisco winter.

Olives in burlap sack

So far, the change in our diet is almost more marked than the change in the weather. The Academy is fed by something called the Rome Sustainable Food Project (RSFP), and one of their principles is serving seasonal food. Late summer tomatoes gave way to beets (not my favorite), which are too slowly giving way to broccoli (which I like). Desserts have gone from summer fruits to various cakes. (“Cakes,” as Erin likes to say, “are always in season.”) The RSFP also likes to get us involved in getting the food from the ground to our plates, and in that spirit the head chef invited us to take part in harvesting the olives from the dozen or so olive trees in the garden.

This is the whole operation at a distance

The operation works roughly like this: You put some fine-mesh netting on the ground, knock off all the olives, then gather them up and pour them into a burlap sack. You can see the whole thing from a distance at right. There are little claw things that you use to rake the olives off the branch. Some people work on the ground, others from ladders, others climb the tree. If you’re standing on the ground, the olives literally rain down on you. Like any kind of working outdoors, it’s fun while the novelty lasts and the fresh air is a change of pace. Then your hands hurt, and your back hurts, and you’re bored. I was lucky to be out there with good people and have good conversation (although Erin, unfortunately, missed the harvest because she had her Italian class). Even more luckily, the chef came out mid-morning to bring us espresso and grappa, along with some toasted bread and olive oil that had been pressed just a few days ago. So I suppose we didn’t have the worst working conditions that any agricultural workers have ever faced (although one might speculate that the combination of tree-climbing and grappa, a strong liquor, made for working conditions of questionable safety). The oil, by the way, really was the best I’ve ever tasted.
 

Tom, after eating a raw olive (dramatization)

You may be able to tell from the pictures that the olives were dark and perfectly ripe. How could we keep from eating just a few? Well, the olives have their own means of protection. Raw olives are really, really, REALLY gross. At left is a picture of me trying one. Don’t try one. (The picture is a re-enactment, but believe me when I say that it was really bad.)

After the harvest, the olives go to get pressed. I didn’t go along for this part, but it also sounds very cool. Apparently there are places where anyone can come and bring their olives and get them pressed. The pressing machines separate out the pits, which are dried and burned to fuel the operation, and they also separate out the water, which goes to irrigate other olive trees nearby. All that’s left is the delicious delicious oil, which I hope to see plenty of on my plate in the near future. A few more pictures are included below.

Till next time, dear readers,

Tom

Tom, hard at work in the chill Roman fall

A little something to keep us going

Let's see if we can't get some of the sticks and leaves out of there

Burlap sack and olive tree, in their natural setting