Eurof Uppington

WITI is published daily and supported by our paid tier. Go sign up for seven dollars a month. We appreciate your consideration and remind you that subscriptions can often be expensed.Subscribe nowEurof Uppington (EU) used to run hedge fund money until he came to his senses. Now he worries about how we eat, and sells olive oil from family farmers in Greece to restaurants in Switzerland and France. He has a startup, Amfora Sarl, based in Geneva (www.amforahome.ch).Eurof here. These are heady times for plant-based meat entrepreneurs. Last month Leonardo di Caprio announced he owned bits of two cell-based meat producers, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms. Woody Harrelson, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Lewis Hamilton, and Roger Federer have also all invested in the sector. Impossible Meat is worth $7 billion with Beyond Meat trailing just a billion behind. As I write, Daring Foods (with Drake and Naomi Osaka onboard) announced a Series C of $65 million to sell their plant-based chicken into Walmart. It’s the biggest trend in food—the intersection of money, climate awareness, veganism, and celebrity cool.Why is this interesting? Future generations will likely look back on factory farming as one of humanity’s greatest crimes. The science is clear: humans must eat less meat. Climate impact is the urgent task of all of us, and each cattle feedlot and industrial piggery is an environmental disaster. In the cruelty-free plant-based world, morality and climate conscience are the great motivators. Alt-meat isn’t new, a fact often forgotten. Long before Drake, the first celebrity backer of alt-meat was Linda Mccartney. The idea is one of her great legacies, and she should get more credit from the industry. Her eponymous brand, made from extruded soy, along with the mycoprotein fungus-based Quorn, was a staple of TV ads in the UK in the 1990s. The vegetarian and vegan movements she helped inspire are enthusiastic forces behind the rise of alt-meat. There is evidence, however, that the wave is cresting. The financial performance of Beyond Meat, the first public company in the space, has been disappointing, and signs are mounting of a sector-wide slowdown. Alt-meat is an increasingly competitive space—for a while now Big Food incumbents with copycat products and huge marketing budgets have been taking market share. There may not be enough consumer appetite to justify the amount of money being plowed into the sector, or the sheer number of well-funded competitors. A hard winter may be coming.The sad fact is that alt-meat has intrinsic problems. Larissa Zimberoff’s excellent book, Technically Food, dives into the nitty-gritty of how many alt-meats are made. Some of it makes uneasy reading for the climate aware. Pea-based protein isolate, a common ingredient, often comes from US-grown peas. But given a lack of local processing facilities, the peas can be exported 1000s of miles to be processed in China, after which the isolate is re-imported to the US to be processed into patties. Not very green. Soy and corn are other key ingredients, heavily subsidized and grown using intensively, doused in soil-killing, carbon-emitting fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. We know that ultra-processed food is bad for us. Yes, real meat “is made of chemicals” too, as alt-meat proponents point out. But unlike some alt-meat ingredients, it isn’t bleached, 3D printed, extruded, or precipitated in hexane. Alternatives to alt meat exist which are less problematic. The first is, duh, eating less meat—more beans, fruits, leaves, perhaps in tomato sauce with, hopefully, a lot of olive oil. Many vegans, while lauding the potential of alt-meat to convert carnivores to cruelty-free food, don’t touch alt-meat, because. . . they don’t like meat. Why buy something that tries its best to mimic something you swore off long ago? If alt-meat is just the on-ramp to veganism, the extensive market investors are plugging in their models may be too optimistic.Kinder, climate-friendly, but more expensive meat is the other alternative. Farmers are striking back. Regenerative agriculture proponents say (with some evidence) that grass-fed meat can net sequester carbon. Polyface Farm in Virginia, run by the controversial Joel Salatin, has long been held up as a paragon of sustainable agriculture. The very beautiful Pastoral Song by James Rebanks describes how traditional farming values, lost in the 1980s and 1990s, can be rediscovered to create animal husbandry more in tune with the natural world—something alt-meat definitely is not. Happy cows eating grass is a more seductive image than the misery of the feedlot. And given the current consensus that meat hurts the climate, the thought I might be saving the planet by eating a hamburger is comforting.A third alternative is as yet unproven. Cell-based meat has also seen huge waves of investment. There are impediments to overcome—the most reliable broth to grow cells in is derived from aborted calves. Tiny viral or bacterial infections can kill whole batches, and production at scale hasn’t yet been achieved. Many commentators say cell-based will never work. They may be right, but improbable feats of science have been achieved by other industries, notably semiconductors. Whatever the outcome, though, this is still far away.Should we give up on the dreams of alt-meat? No. Our cruel industrial farming system must die. We have to fix the climate and eat less meat. But the consensus that alt-meat is the solution for our ills is likely coming to an end. Other ideas are coming over the horizon. In particular, the promise of regenerative agriculture for climate and a better food system is huge, and largely unexploited by climate and food investors. (EU)Quick Links:A very cool Seiko Prospex watch (CJN)An intriguing new hotel in LA from friend of WITI Jeff Klein (CJN)CIA and Gen Z (CJN)[Sponsored: Atlas Bars are GMO-free and keto-friendly with 15 grams of protein and just a gram of sugar. We’ve tried Atlas and they are very good. Use this link for WITI readers to get 20 percent off. Get started with the sample pack.]--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.The future of climate tech. One crucial component in facing the climate crisis? New technologies, such as better batteries for electric vehicles, meat alternatives, or improved energy storage. While significant progress still needs to be made, the drive to develop and scale climate tech is accelerating. A new article lays out five themes that could attract $2 trillion of annual investment by 2025. --Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Eurof (EU) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Future of Meat Edition

You should become a paid subscriber to WITI. Subscribe nowEurof Uppington (EU) used to run hedge fund money until he came to his senses. Now he worries about how we eat, and sells olive oil from family farmers in Greece to restaurants in Switzerland and France. He has a startup, Amfora Sarl, based in Geneva (www.amforahome.ch).Eurof here. Overestimating the importance of olive oil in the Mediterranean might, I suppose, be possible. But without it, all the stuff Greeks invented would have had to come from somewhere else. Olive oil was a pillar of the ancient Phoenician, Minoan, Greek, and Roman civilizations and the original trading commodity: the first recorded derivative transaction, in 600 BC, speculated in olive oil. Today 1 billion olive trees cover Greece, Italy, Spain, the Levant, and North Africa, creating landscape, ecology, tradition, identity, history, and 2.5 million tons of oil.Olive oil is a $10 billion a year global industry and the only global farm product that never industrialized. It’s mostly still small farmers, using methods unchanged for centuries, with minimal fertilizer and pesticide. This is changing, and fast. Since the Mediterranean diet came to prominence in the 80s and 90s, a new way of producing olives—so-called “high density” (HD) and “super high density” (SHD) cultivation—has been taking over. Today these methods account for more than 30% of the world’s production. The HD and SHD approaches now dominate in Spain, Tunisia, and Portugal. The effects on rural life and the environment in the Mediterranean, which still accounts for 95% of world production, have been profound.Why is this interesting? Olive trees are drought-resistant, long-lived, and incredibly efficient. Sufficiently distant from each other, they need no inputs to produce fruit, and with a bit of pruning will yield you a living. It’s classic regenerative agriculture. HD production shrank the gaps between trees and introduced both synthetic fertilizer and irrigation to the growing process. A hectare that once held 500 trees could suddenly stock 2,000. While farmers needed to spend additional money on pesticides and herbicides, the step up in productivity was game-changing, particularly in terms of labor. With regular height and spacing between trees, over-the-row machines replaced the human hands who onced pruned, tended, and harvested. Throughout Spain, and particularly Andalucia, old growth trees were ripped up to make way for the new dense rows. Local, national, and European subsidies accelerated the transformation—blenders, brands, and supermarkets loved the uniform nature of the HD product. Farms grew bigger and integrated vertically, building modern mills on-site. Now able to better control processing, olive oil quality improved further.The effect on the countryside, however, was disastrous. Without farm jobs and local mills, villages died. Traditional farmers found their ecosystem disappearing and were forced to abandon farms, sell up, or join the HD party. The results have seen the once populous Spanish countryside denuded of people. Today Spain makes almost twice as much olive oil as Greece and Italy combined, with half the number of farmers.Environmental impacts were worse. Nitrate runoffs destroyed water quality throughout southern Spain and irrigation schemes have depleted water tables, threatening desertification. Biodiversity has collapsed and soil erosion has increased as terraces fail. Simply put, the land hasn’t been able to cope.The secondary effects have spread throughout the Mediterranean. Irrigation from a new dam in Alentejo enabled HD farming in Portugal, which has overtaken Greece to be the third biggest olive-producing country in the world. Tunisia, an enthusiastic adopter, is also climbing the rankings fast. From 2015, as this new HD production came online, olive oil prices have collapsed and the effects have been felt by rural populations throughout the Mediterranean. All is not lost yet, and some of us (myself included) are actively trying to find new ways to ensure these traditional methods and their amazing outputs aren’t lost to history with a host of unintended consequences tumbling behind. My company, Amfora, matches traditional farmers with restaurants: buying their olive oil at 2-3x the local price and selling in bulk. “Adopt a tree” schemes attempt to preserve old-growth trees, EU agricultural policies are changing to favor smaller producers, and many HD growers have adopted what Michael Pollen calls “industrial organic”, which mitigates runoff and biodiversity loss.There are no winners to this story yet. It’s probably too late for much of Spain. The best we can do now is try to preserve what is left in the rest of the Mediterranean, but for that to happen we need to build a system where small farmers can be paid fairly for the products they create, as well as the ecosystem services they perform for us all. This will involve a mindset change for the industry, for consumers, and creating a parallel, regenerative and ethical food system alongside our current destructive one, which can slowly absorb and replace it.[Sponsored links: Atlas Bars are GMO-free and keto-friendly with 15 grams of protein and just a gram of sugar. We’ve tried Atlas and they are very good. Use this link (code WITI20) for WITI readers to get 20 percent off. Get started with the sample pack.]--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Asia's growing global role. You probably don’t need us to tell you that Asia plays a key role in culture and the global economy. But if, say, Squid Game's worldwide success took you by surprise, you might get something out of the latest edition of McKinsey for Kids, which heads to Asia and digs into how the stuff you love—be it your favorite hoodie or binge-worthy TV—gets to you. Explore the interactive for a fun look at big ships, the Silk Road, Bollywood, and more of Asia’s past, present, and future.--Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Eurof (EU)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Olive Oil Edition

Eurof Uppington (EU) used to run hedge fund money until he came to his senses. Now he worries about how we eat, and sells olive oil from family farmers in Greece to restaurants in Switzerland and France. He has a startup, Amfora Sarl, based in Geneva (www.amforahome.ch).Eurof here. Three questions I worry about when buying food are 1) “is this healthy and tasty?” 2) “is it good quality?” and 3) “am I harming the planet”? Buying olive oil can worry people all three ways. I work in olive oil and claim some limited expertise. My goal here is to help you to make an informed buying decision, whatever is on sale where you are. Why is this interesting? The olive oil industry is opaque, with many steps between farmer and consumer, regulatory capture, and outright corruption. I live in Switzerland, and here a 2019 study found the majority of “extra virgin” olive oils on sale were mislabeled and effectively rancid. Only 21% were properly extra virgin. The rest were mostly “virgin”, a lower grade with taste defects, and worse, 23% were lampante, not even food grade. 4% weren’t olive oil at all. Price was no guide: mislabeling was roughly the same at all price points. The US is a producer country, so might be better, but there hasn’t been a comprehensive study since UC Davis in 2010 found that 69% of imported oils failed the “extra virgin” taste test (Californian ones weren’t tested, an interesting omission).So, question number one, how do we know if an olive oil is the real thing? Well, good news: bad olive oil won’t hurt you. You’re just missing out on what it could be. But to get there we need a fresh, properly extra virgin olive oil, and lots of it. To make sure, we need as much information as possible. Now; does your bottle say “First cold press” on it? That’s not information, rather marketing flim flam, like saying “wheels included” on a car. All virgin oils are “cold press” by definition. Instead you want space-time coordinates: a harvest (not bottling) date in the last 12 months, ideally from a single producer. Failing that, a region and the olive variety are your best bet. Look for free fatty acid content, a measure of the quality of the fruit at pressing. Extra virgin grade should be 0.8% or less, though California is more stringent and defines the threshold at 0.5%. If you find 0.3% or less, buy it. Showing polyphenol content is even better, but rare. Don’t worry too much about what the numbers are. Simple disclosure shows someone cares.Freshness is critical, so proper packaging is too. Avoid plain glass: light is the enemy and will oxidize your oil. Brown or green glass is better, but still lets in light. I like metal, preferably tinplate. Try and buy in as large size as possible to reduce the ratio of surface area to volume—the less the oil comes into contact with anything else, the better. 3L and 5L cans are a good way to go.Assessing environmental impact is harder. Supermarket oils are generally blends, sourced from giant intensive farms, using pesticides and fertilizers. Traditionally produced oils are much better. Annoyingly most new world oils, Californian, Australian, and South American, tend to be intensively produced. Spanish and Portuguese can be, too. Greek and Italian are safer as these oils still come mostly from smaller artisanal farms. I wrote about this in a recent WITI. If it’s not clear from the bottle, reckon there’s at least some intensive product in there.As for finding the “best” olive oil, there is a high end culture, with sommeliers, qualified tasters, prizes and rituals, though it’s less well developed than in wine. Really top brands compete on polyphenol content. Dan Flynn, ex head of the UC Davis Olive Center, used to swear by The Governor from Corfu, which in the past has boasted incredible polyphenol values of 900mg/kg. I recently discovered 2 US brands, Brightland, disclosing polyphenols in the high 700s, and Fat Gold, a lower priced oil from traditional groves, whose owners definitely know what they’re doing. (Editor’s note: both are friends of WITI and worth supporting.) Be warned though, high polyphenols can mean early harvest and therefore extra bitterness. Fruit and grassy tastes are what most people like, though if you get into olive oil, over time you’ll appreciate bitterness too. To sum up, if you know where your oil comes from, you’re already ahead of the game. If you only have a supermarket to shop from with an unsatisfactory selection, go online. In the US default to Californian unless you find an old world oil that ticks the boxes. Buy in bulk because it’s cheaper, keeps better, and you’ll have enough to use it for everything. Finally, taste!, sample, compare. Get some friends over and have an olive oil party. (EU)Quick Links: Quick Links:I always viewed not-olive cooking oils (like sunflower, canola, soy etc) as nasty stuff, not at all as good for you as fresh olive oil. Now the latest  evidence says. . .  they’re actually toxic. Huge implications for global diets, not just in the US. But also hope if this turns out to be the key to chronic disease. This is the longer (45 min), more scientific and infinitely more terrifying version. (EU)Growing up in the UK in the late 70s and 80s we were all encouraged to eat now apparently deadly hydrogenated trans fats in margarine brands such as Flora (amazingly still on sale). I love TV commercials from the period, the heyday of the UK ad industry just for the effortless style. But now the equivalent of the old cigarette commercials, there’s this. (EU)In our house, the go-to metaphor referring to once desirable but now-in-retrospect dangerous products is “radioactive underwear”, an actual thing in the heyday of the early C20th Radium craze Luckily, now we can buy the opposite.  (EU)WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Quantum computing advances. One example, a research center in Japan made a breakthrough in entangling qubits (a basic unit of information in quantum) that could make large-scale quantum computers possible. Investment’s pouring in, start-ups are proliferating—but what does it mean for your organization? A new report,  gives you intel on how to start strategizing.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Eurof (EU) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Olive Oil Buying Edition

Eurof Uppington (EU) used to run hedge fund money until he came to his senses. Now he worries about how we eat and sells olive oil from family farmers in Greece to restaurants in Switzerland and France. He has previously written about olive oil (twice) and the future of meat.Eurof here. The job of modern agriculture, as Michael Pollan famously noted, is to turn fossil fuels into edible calories for humans. There are many steps by which crude oil becomes a salad, a hamburger, a soft drink, or a chicken (or alt-chicken) nugget, but it all started in 1909 with Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. The pair invented and commercialized a process to create ammonia and thereby nitrogen fertilizer and explosives from natural gas, naphtha, and coal—at scale. The Haber-Bosch process is foundational to our food system, post-war population growth, and much of the modern world. Together with pesticides, farm automation, and GMOs, nitrogen fertilizer is a key factor behind the lesser-known “Moore’s Law” of food: US corn yields have grown a steady 2 bushels/acre every year since the 1950s.Nitrogen is the key factor in promoting plant growth. The relationship between food calories and fossil fuel is incredibly direct. Half a gallon of crude makes a bushel of corn or 5,600 Tostito corn chips, or high fructose corn syrup for 410 cans of Coca-Cola. All made from dead dinosaurs. So yes, the food system is addicted to nitrogen. And we’re about to go cold turkey.Why is this interesting?Energy prices and thereby cost pressure in agricultural inputs were sky high before the invasion of Ukraine. With the war, the sudden disruption to grain production, together with rising gas prices, have increased pressure to levels where key commodity prices are going haywire, with mostly bad 1st- and 2nd-order consequences.Short-term disruptions are already unavoidable. Food price inflation in key ingredients will accelerate, with all that that involves for countries with underdeveloped welfare states. Specifically, Ukraine and Russia provide 60% of the world’s sunflower oil and 30% of global wheat exports. Prices for both are at decade highs. Even if mass starvation should be avoided, the disruption of food supplies in politically unstable countries can have important results. Remember the Arab Spring? That was preceded by 20% spikes in food inflation across the Middle East, which is particularly dependent on wheat. Egyptian analysts are worried all over again.But the 2nd order, long-term consequences of permanently higher natural gas prices may be more meaningful. Methane, natural gas, is today the key input of the Haber-Bosch process. At the beginning of 2021, the price of Iowa ammonia—a form of nitrogen fertilizer—was already 3x costlier than it was twelve months earlier. We don’t know where the price will eventually go (except up), but the factories have already started to shut down. They’ll reopen only when the price of fertilizer has risen to cover the rapidly rising price of gas.Cheap fertilizer=cheap food. Nitrogen fertilizer created inexpensive corn and soy, the anchor crops of our food system. According to NYU, highly processed calories provide almost 60% of all calories in the typical US diet. In these foods, corn- and soy-based ingredients feature prominently as sweeteners, thickeners, fats, and overall dry weight. US meat production is even more corn and soy-dependent. 95% of beef is “grain-finished” in giant feedlots. Europe may be less affected as more calories come from more heterogenous whole foods, but even there, the percentage of household income spent on food has plummeted in the last 50 years. This is likely to reverse. So the main 2nd order consequence is going to be generalized disruption. For food companies with weak market power, unable to pass on rising costs, this is going to be a problem. Our main concern, however, should be for food-insecure families on the edge of poverty.The main glimmer of hope from the fertilizer crisis is environmental. We all understand that the Ukraine crisis is going to lead to renewed efforts to decarbonize energy and transport, to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Fertilizer is a direct contributor to global warming in many ways, most notably because much of it evaporates as NO2. There’s a huge set of farming techniques to regenerate soil that developed world farmers have simply stopped using, like composting, cover crops, rotations, and mixed farming combining arable and livestock. Cheap fertilizer did away with the need for all that. WIthout cheap gas, we’re going to have to rely much more on natural means to create soil fertility. With that should come improved nutrient density, tastier food, and, above all, massive carbon sequestration in soil.Maybe that’s the 3rd order consequence of this coming crisis, and I’m hopeful. The end of the era of fossil-fueled nitrogen dominance might mean a new golden age of food! We just have to get through some pretty terrible stuff first. (EU)--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Tech trends for 2022. What technology trends are top of mind for business? We asked leaders in industry, academia, and at McKinsey to share their perspectives on what’s likely to headline business agendas this year, trends that could—but shouldn’t—slip through the cracks, and what executives should think about when considering new technologies. Here’s what they told us.—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Eurof (EU) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Nitrogen Edition

Eurof Uppington (EU) is a reformed finance guy turned olive oil merchant at Amfora.Eurof here. There is much weirdness in olive oil this year. It’s a boom time for small farmers in the eastern Mediterranean, like Greece, Albania, and Turkey, who are seeing bumper harvests and sky-high prices. However, it’s a disaster in Spain, the biggest producer nation, where unseasonal heat early in the year killed the crop. The harvest is down by half. Spain makes 50% of the world’s olive oil. This is a big deal. No one remembers it being like this before.Since I started my olive oil business in 2019, I’ve learned to respect olive farmers. So much can go wrong that sometimes it feels like nature itself has it in for them. Take the recent plagues of olive fly—a pesky creature that likes to lay its eggs in plump, green olives. The worms burrow out, ruin the fruit, and can spawn a new generation 2-3 times a season. Last year one of our farmers suffered a catastrophic loss two weeks before harvest. Literally, all his ripe, heavy fruit was blown off his trees by a freak storm. While olive trees are drought resistant and normally thrive in heat, frosts and unseasonable temperatures in spring can play havoc. Like this year, it was an unprecedented 90℉-104℉ mid-May in Andalucia, the main producing region of Spain. The delicate, just-pollinated flowers simply burned in the heat. No olives this year in the olive-growing center of the world. WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.The Intermodal Spirit covers exploring, relating, and being & presents The St. Agnes Journal: chronicling the Y2K-era simple life on a 70-person, mile-wide island. Subscribe now.January is a great month to begin working with a coach to meet your goals. Gain insight, accountability, and support. Subscribe to Mission.For 10 years, this has been the go-to newsletter for people who like to keep up with what’s exciting in design, books, beauty, food, & more. nullStat Significant is a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about culture, economics, sports, statistics, and more. Check out Stat Significant.Supercharge your lifelong learning. Upnext lets you save any content, and actually get to it later. Supports articles, podcasts and video! Try Upnext for freeBrXnd is a new project at the intersection of brands and AI. Have a play with the first experiment: AI brand collabs. Try it now.Why is this interesting?We might think this is just bad news for Andalucian olive farmers and shrug. But this harvest season is going to affect us all in ways we might not notice. Firstly, the price we pay for our olive oil is going to go up. This is on top of price rises for other cooking oils, like sunflower and canola, as Ukraine and Russia are key producers.However, because olive oil brands lack market power, they won’t be able to pass on the full cost increase. What they’re more likely to do is lower the quality of shop-bought olive oil.A dirty secret of the industry is that the amount of extra virgin olive oil produced in the world is less than the amount consumed. The big brands make “more” EVOO by diluting it. The magic number is 0.8%—that’s the maximum amount of free fatty acid (FFA) content an olive oil can have to be extra virgin. Brands will blend 250ml of an excellent EVOO of 0.2% FFA with 750ml of an oil of 1% FFA—a much cheaper “virgin” grade: hey presto! One liter of EVOO with a 0.79% FFA!This practice is likely to increase, but it’s not technically illegal. Though real fraud is likely to increase, too, such as the full substitution of EVOO by virgin and refined grades. A few years ago, some popular EVOOs sold in Germany turned out to have been diluted with paraffin. The industry has improved recently as the supply of EVOO has increased, but its knowledge of how to adulterate olive oil (and get away with it) has remained.Higher prices may mean restaurants will save money by reheating the same oil multiple times. This is particularly dangerous with heavily refined products like canola, sunflower, and soy-based vegetable oils, but even olive oils can turn mildly toxic if heated too often and for too long. Lower-quality EVOO with higher acidity and lower polyphenol content is particularly vulnerable to excessive reheating.The effects of this year’s shortage aren’t likely to last, however. As in any commodity, a shortage in one period tends to lead to a glut in the next. Attracted by today’s high prices, olive farmers are likely to try and boost production in the coming years as much as they can. New hyper-efficient industrial olive production comes online every year. Yes, with climate change there may be more variability in harvests in the future, but in the short term, weather is random.If you’re in the US, know that Californian EVOO is unaffected, and standards are much higher anyway. There are plenty of producers religiously committed to quality. There’s still going to be great product on shelves and online; we just might have to look harder. As an olive oil consumer, I don’t worry too much, and as an olive oil salesman, I urge you to consume as much olive oil as you possibly can. So hang in there, lovers of olive oil. We’ll get through this. (EU)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Eurof (EU) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.