What to look for when buying olive oil, by Tom Mueller

From Tom Mueller's blog - EV (Extra Virginity) - Truth in Olive Oil

Key concepts

• Olives are stone fruits, like cherries and plums.  So real extra virgin olive oil is fresh-squeezed fruit juice – seasonal, perishable, and never better than the first few weeks it was made.
• Bitterness and pungency are usually indicators of an oil’s healthfulness.  Sweetness and butteriness are often not.
• There are 700+ different kinds of olives, which make thousands of different kinds of oil.  Asking “what’s the best olive oil?” is like asking “what’s the best wine?”  The answer is, “depends on what you’re eating it with.”
• Know the when, who, where of your oil:  When it was made (harvest date), who made it (specific producer name), and exactly where on the planet they made it.
• Read my book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
  to understand the bigger picture about where olive oil, great and bad, comes from, and who is making it.
• Like everything on Extravirginity.com, this guide is work in progress, and will be upgraded soon.

Buyer’s guide

• Unlike many wines, which improve with age, extra virgin olive oil is perishable:  like all natural fruit juices, its flavor and aroma begin to deteriorate within a few months of milling, a decline that accelerate when the oil is bottled, and really speeds up when the bottle is opened.  To get the freshest oil, and cut out middle-men who often muddy olive oil transparency and quality, buy as close to the mill as possible.  If you’re lucky enough to live near a mill (in California, but now also Texas, Oregon, Georgia, Arizona and Florida – and of course throughout the Mediterranean, Australia, South Africa and beyond), visit it during the harvest to see how olives are picked, crushed, stirred, and spun into olive oil.  I’ve included many profiles of millers and oil makers in the US, the Mediterranean, Australia and elsewhere to be found in my book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, which captures their remarkable craftsmanship and perfectionism despite a day-to-day struggle with fraud.

...for the rest of the report, please click here.

Nellie McKay - "A World without Love"

How to increase Youtube views

Yes, watching paint dry can fetch plenty of Web views

The Times paid two online video-promotion sites to generate tens of thousands of views for a nearly two-minute video of a streak of blue paint drying.

By Jack Leonard and David Sarno, Los Angeles Times
10:47 PM PST, March 3, 2012

Who says no one wants to watch paint dry?

In an effort to find out how easy it is to buy YouTube views, The Times posted two identical videos of a wet streak of blue children's paint. The 1-minute 47-second videos were given similar titles with deliberately misspelled words to lower the chances they'd be found in regular searches by Web users. One was uploaded to reporter Jack Leonard's YouTube account and the other to reporter David Sarno's.

The Times randomly chose a pair of websites touting quick and cheap views for any video and purchased 40,000 views for Leonard's clip. WorkingYouTubeViews.com charged $46 for 20,000 views; IncreaseYouTubeViews.com was paid $57 for another 20,000.

After eight days, the views on Leonard's video had hit 60,000 — far more than had been paid for. Sarno's video had only 13 views.

Emails sent to the two sites seeking explanations were unreturned. Information embedded in Leonard's video showed that thousands of the views originated on Facebook, suggesting the view boosters might have bought cheap ads on the social network to shotgun the view out to users, a small percentage of whom might have clicked.

Google searches showed that the video had been embedded on a yoga website in the United Kingdom and on a separate video-sharing site registered in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. It was not clear how much traffic those sites generated.

jack.leonard@latimes.com

david.sarno@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times