scholarly journals Olive Oil: History, Production, and Characteristics of the World's Classic Oils

HortScience ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 1093-1100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Vossen

The true origin of the olive is not known but is speculated to be Syria or possibly sub-Saharan Africa. For more than 6000 years, the cultivated olive has developed alongside Mediterranean civilizations and is now commercially produced on more than 23 million acres (9.4 million ha) in the Mediterranean basin. New plantings also exist in California, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. Various nonscientific selection processes created a multitude of different cultivars. Many villages in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa feature distinct varieties. However, it is also common to see the same cultivars with different names and, in some cases, different cultivars with the same name. This is currently being sorted out with DNA identification. The olive tree requires some chilling; tolerates hot, dry conditions; does not like moisture during bloom, and actually produces better with some stress. As a result, olives were traditionally relegated to lands where little else would survive. For thousands of years olives were grown primarily for lamp oil, with little regard for culinary flavor. World production of table olives is now about 1.5 million t/year. The “California Style” black table olive is virtually unknown outside the United States, and this very mild-flavored olive is largely used on pizzas. Elsewhere, table olive recipes are as varied as the villages in the Mediterranean region. Oil styles are also varied, and most olive fruit (≈16 million t/year) is processed into oil. There are about 19 classic styles of olive oil produced in the world, primarily based on specific varieties grown in different regions. In some cases oils are made with a blend of regional varieties. Defective olive oil is common worldwide. The author discusses six of the world's most influential olive oil varieties ‘Picual’, ‘Coratina’, ‘Koroneiki’, ‘Arbequina’, ‘Frantoio’, and ‘Leccino’; covers some horticultural history of oil olive cultivation and processing; and describes the most current trends toward superhigh-density plantings and automated continuous oil processing.

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Hanson ◽  
Craig McIntosh

How will worldwide changes in population affect pressures for international migration in the future? We examine the past three decades, during which population pressures contributed to substantial labor flows from neighboring countries into the United States and Europe, and contrast them with the coming three decades, which will see sharp reductions in labor-supply growth in Latin America but not in Africa or much of the Middle East. Using a gravity-style empirical model, we examine the contribution of changes in relative labor-supply to bilateral migration in the 2000s and then apply this model to project future bilateral flows based on long-run UN forecasts of working-age populations in sending and receiving countries. Because the Americas are entering an era of uniformly low population growth, labor flows across the Rio Grande are projected to slow markedly. Europe, in contrast, will face substantial demographically driven migration pressures from across the Mediterranean for decades to come. Although these projected inflows would triple the first-generation immigrant stocks of larger European countries between 2010 and 2040, they would still absorb only a small fraction of the 800-million-person increase in the working-age population of Sub-Saharan Africa that is projected to occur over this period.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (01) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Leonard M. Thompson

The growth of the study of the history of Africa south of the Sahara is an interesting example of contemporary intellectual developments. Until the mid-1950's African history was ignored by the historical profession in the United States even more completely than in Europe; and if an American historian had paused to consider why this was so, he would probably have anticipated Trevor-Roper's well-known verdict that the history of sub-Saharan Africa is undiscoverable (on the ground that it is not documented) and that, even if it were discoverable, it would be devoid of intellectual significance (on the ground that traditional African societies were barbarous and static). No professor with tenure at an American university was designated as a historian of sub-Saharan Africa; American publishers had produced very few books or articles dealing with African history, and Americans generally knew scarcely anything about it. There were, however, several pioneer activities which were on the periphery of African history. At Howard University there were long-established courses on Negro history, inspired by W. E. B. DuBois and Carter Woodson, which included some West African material, but the American historical establishment paid little attention to this work. William L. Hansberry, who lectured on precolonial African history for some years, was never given tenure by the Howard authorities and was eventually excluded from the faculty. At Northwestern University, Melville Herskovits founded a program of African Studies in 1947. He invited historians to attend the seminars conducted under the program, and he himself published a book on the kingdom of Dahomey and was interested in questions of change as well as structure in African societies. Nevertheless, Herskovits was by training and status an anthropologist, and the history department at Northwestern did not provide lecture courses or seminars on African history before 1958.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.


Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Keese

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.


Author(s):  
Claire H. Griffiths

Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era. However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa. The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.


2018 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. S155 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Grover ◽  
M. Narasimhamurthy ◽  
R. Bhatia ◽  
C. Benn ◽  
K. Fearnhead ◽  
...  

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-796
Author(s):  
Samuel L. Katz

Drs Terry and Schneider raise legitimate questions regarding changes in polio immunization recommendations. In response to the former, although two doses of inactivated polio vaccine provide humoral immunity that will protect an individual against central nervous system invasion by wild or revertant attenuated polioviruses, they do not provide intestinal immunity, a valued asset of oral polio vaccine (OPV). Because we live in a global community where jet transportation enables one to move from a polio-endemic area to a polio-free area in less than one day, the introduction of wild polio viruses from sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia poses a legitimate threat and concern to those who wish to maintain community protection, in addition to individual protection, against possible reintroduction of wild virus to the United States.


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