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Olive Oil — It’s a Real Gusher
Or, how the olives got from the tree to your table, Part II
An oil boom you might be pleased to see comes at the end of the olive harvest when the olives are transported to a cooperative or other processing plant. Since we should be getting off oil from petroleum, sooner rather than later, a healthier oil boom would be nice. Whereas petroleum has unhealthy effects, olive oil is just the opposite.
The first step in olive production is to remove all those leaves and twigs from the olives. The cooperativa in Mora d’Ebre, Spain, is set up to dump the olives into a hopper, and from there they move on a conveyor where puffs of air blow all the debris away.
Then, they proceed down the conveyor where the olives are weighed in large funnels in the lower right of the photo below.
From there, another conveyor takes the olives to be washed in cold water then into the macerator where they are converted to mash. This allows the release of the oil, a fruit juice, to be extracted.
