Tour of a Plant Producing Olive Oil

It was just a side-thought as Mary and I were driving back from the To the Death Chess Tournament when she decided to show me an olive-processing plant.  The place was surprisingly-small and yet was producing an enormous quantity of olive oil.  Note in this sequence that nothing artificial is added to the mix anywhere during the process and all of the work is accomplished by about a dozen men.

Note: The current standing in the Tournament is 3 to 2 so there was some vindication for the home team (i.e. me) tonight!


Let's make some olive oil, shall we.


First you pour bushel after bushel of the raw olives into the machine that strips off twigs and everything else leaving nothing but the the olive:

Then you collect the stripped olives to feed them into the next stage of processing:

This machine chops the olives into little bits:

Here the chopped up bits of olive are refined closer toward the final stage of oil:

Here's the last stage of processing in producing pure olive oil:

A massive volume of olive oil is produced and stored in these huge vats on the wall of the plant opposite the machines that refine it.  The process is remarkably efficient and all of it is immaculately clean:

The long-shot shows you the small size of the plant and yet it's producing an enormous volume of a product that hasn't been duplicated very well anywhere else in the world.  There's a substantial resentment in Greece that the pure olive oil produced here only fetches about two euros on the world market and is bottled in other countries (e.g. Italy) where it is re-marketed for about fifteen euros.  This is apparently due to political corruption in Greece which prevents it from being bottled here.  This seems like particularly suicidal corruption but political corruption is suicidal anywhere.