Introducing Valued Becomings
As I write this post, I have been conducting fieldwork for 124 days and counting. Literally counting, for I make note of the number of days that I have been immersed in this place — alongside that of its practices and processes — with each entry I make in my diary. It occurs daily and it is a way of keeping record of my work. Also, of reckoning with the processual becoming of it, such as related to the time through which it materializes. I namely experience it easy to get lost in the day-to-day work if I do not also think with the time spent engaging with the matters that my research concerns. As such, the numerical record acts as a way to ground myself in time and space; to remind my being that I have gained quite a lot of experiences and hitherto collected quite an assemble of ethnographic material. I have learnt much by doing and gathered insightful awareness both with regards to the practices that I study and the way in which I go about doing so. The immersive-laden methodological approaches by which my research is undertaken allows me to practically experience the doings and processes through which olive cultivation emerge and the making of olive oil here become. It thus provides an embodied and emplaced knowing of the subjects matters at hand. On that note, numerical and methodology influenced as it occurs, let us consider some measured becoming inherent to olive oil, and to account for some particularly valued and certifiably assessed materializations of it.
Through my fieldwork explorations, I have learnt that olive oil become as much through practices of cultivation as through biological processes, technological transformations and chemical parameters. They become as much through locally assessed matters as through globally, let alone legally, standardized systems of classification. They become generated as much through the skills of practitioners as through environmental conditions and happenstances. The becoming of a certain olive oil and quality occurs processual and it correlates, as noted above, to a vast range of factors and circumstances; some of which happen to be more or less in the hands of producers, and others which occur much out of their control, such as weather conditions. We have the past two weeks for instance experienced much rain, thereby been unable to harvest most days. This affects the quality and quantity of oils, which both become reduced, such as because the olives becoming too ripened to be transformed into a particularly quality. Moreover, and by way of exemplifying a particular more–less–controlled set of events, while harvesting olives at a certain level of ripeness to produce a certain quality of oil occurs rather controlled by any given practitioner, such as through monitoring practices, to have them pressed in a timely fashion for the oil to be classified as for instance extra virgin may be more difficult to control. This is not least true during mid-October to mid-November when most olives ripen, thereby becomes harvested and ques up at the mills for pressing. This is especially true for the majority of makers that do not have their own pressing facilities. This namely means that their olives oftentimes await their turn to become oil, and this, at times, much longer than wished for to qualify as extra virgin according to prevailing marketing standards.
A consequence of the time elapsed between harvest and extraction is that oils run the risk of becoming (defined as) of lower quality due to the biological processes that take place from the moment that the olives are harvested. Without going into the nitty gritty of the chemico-physiological details of such occurrences and for now keeping it at its most basic level, such as I in my role as an ethnographic researcher has come to understand these things through practical experience, what happens is that the level of acidity, which is an utmost critical quality indicator according to the legislative standards by which olive oils get assessed, increases with time elapsed from harvest to press, causing the evaluated quality to decrease in kind. Consequently, the longer the wait, the more degraded the olives become; the more degraded the raw material, the higher the level of acidity it contains; the higher the level of acidity, the lower the level of quality of the end-product. To make this a bit clearer, the two flow-charts below indicate the commercial denominations by which olive oils occur categorically defined, legally standardized and, as the international food product that they collectively constitute, sold in a global marketplace (charts taken from Peri 2014: 6, 13 respectively). The images feature olives of various degrees of maturity and degradation and in various stages of the production process, where some are still to be harvested, others recently harvested, and yet others awaiting to become processed at the mill. Featured are also images of acidity assessment taking place at the pressing facilities.
“Commission Regulation (EC) No 702/2007 of 21 June 2007 defines the analytical and sensory standards of
all the categories of olive oils, virgin or refined…
These standards have been established by law
as indicators of oil quality and authenticity”
(Peri 2014: 12)
Acidity levels of oils become habitually tested at the pressing facilities, much to assess quality, but also to ensure not to mix high quality oils with lower quality ones in the silos where they commonly occur stored until tapped into bottles or tin cans. As visualized above and below, the testing is done by means of dissolving oil either in ethanol or ethyl ether and, using phenolphthalein as indicator, interacting this solvent gradually with a sodium hydroxide solution until the level of acidity occurs visible through the reddish color. For an oil to be legally classified as extra virgin quality, it ought not have free fatty acids beyond the level of 0.8 percent, where levels below 0.3 percent are ranked excellent. Meanwhile, virgin oils may contain up to 2.0 percent acidity before they become categorically defined lamp oils.
All that noted, sitting in Ostuni these early morning hours writing this post, I am to begin my 125 day of fieldwork, during which I will become more familiar with the chemical and sensory quality standards that olive oils are evaluated by. In part by the appointment that I have this forenoon with a research collaborator that will go over the test results of the analysis he did of his oils via an external laboratory; in part by correlating this research event to previous experiences that relates, on the one hand, to the subject matter of evaluating, defining and testing oils, and on the other, to practices of harvest and olive oil extraction. Some complementary reading will most surely be done, too, for as the sensuous-laden ethnographer and beyond-human anthropological analyst that I am, I am as curious to understand the nitty gritty of the material forces influencing the becoming of one olive oil over another, as I am to explore the procedures by which the oils materialize through practical engagement on behalf of practitioners. In other words, critically immersed in the subject matters at hand as I am situated, my analytical engagement centers in this matter on understanding at once the socialites and materialities by which olive oils become, such as in thinking with for instance with how biological processes of degradation correlates to categorical systems of standardization and what this means for and in the everyday workings of producing olive oil. A presto!
References
Peri, Claudio (ed.). 2014. The Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Handbook. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
