Olive Groves

I have been reading Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. In it she creates a simple meal, and then explores in great depth each component of it. She looks at the history of this food, the way it is produced, the myths that surround it, the meanings that cultures have given it, how it has been eaten and cultivated through history. I have found this an absolutely fascinating book. One of the courses in her meal is a simple salad of lettuce, olive oil, and lemon juice.

I learned things about each of the foods she mentions that I had never suspected before, but when I arrived at the olive oil I was affected like I had not been anywhere before in this book -- and considering how upset I got about what we are doing to chickens, that is saying a lot.

An olive tree is an amazing thing. They grow to be up to 2,000 years old. The one pictured here may well be that age. And they bear fruit for all the years of their lives. The planting of an olive tree is a promise to posterity, because until recent botanical advances, the tree you plant is the tree your child will harvest. To invest the work involved in planting and caring for a tree that doesn't bear fruit until you are an elder is a truly altruistic act, on a par with building a light house that keeps ships from crashing on your shores and providing you with salvage.

In the middle east, olive groves are not like an American orchard; they do not belong to one person, they are not full of trees that are being replaced as they age. They belong to communities and all of the trees in an 1,000-year-old olive grove, are 1,000 years old. Individual trees may belong to several families and have been passed down from their ancestors since they were originally planted. The fact that your family was on this land 1,000 years ago to plant this tree, is a deed to land in and of itself.

The trees are loved as individuals. Some of them have personal names; all of them are known to have characteristics that are recognized and celebrated. This tree is a generous giver and that can resist horribly adverse conditions. They are evergreens, so they provide shade all year round. Sometimes, as they grow, their suckers are trained to provide a ladder into the branches for difficult hand picking. Children play beneath them and climb into them.

The fruit can be used only with a great deal of labor. To eat the olives, first they must be bathed in lye, then rinsed, they pickled in brine. The oil must be pressed, a technique of great antiquity and skill. The oil can be used to cook, as a lotion for the skin, to prevent infection in wounds, to burn for light -- it was olive oil that the wise and foolish virgins Christ tells of were burning in their lamps. Olive oil was used to anoint people (priests, popes, kings, guests) and objects; to do so rendered them singular and holy. When kings were anointed with olive oil it meant that they could not be overthrown, they had been accepted by God as his own. Indeed, even when God was displeased with Saul and chose David to replace him, Saul could not be touched because he had been anointed with olive oil.

So, what does it mean when a people's olive groves are destroyed by bulldozers in a border dispute? By a culture that knows full well, as most Americans do not, the meanings and symbols of those groves? What does it mean when the trees your forefathers planted a thousand years ago, the trees that have sustained your family for all that time and in all those ways, the trees that stood as your deed to the land are ripped from the earth?