Olive oil, part 1

These are amphorae.  One amphora, many amphorae.  The picture is taken in the museum of Trajan’s Market, one of the most interesting sites my true love and I visited in Rome.  These odd shaped objects are how items were shipped around the Roman empire back in the day.  These particular amphorae have narrow spouts and moderate bodies, which means they were probably used for something liquid and that was almost certainly olive oil. When we were in the Market museum, we wondered about the shape.  These obviously won’t sit on the floor, but they are so ubiquitous that there must have been a reason for this peculiar shape.  We (mostly I) speculated about this for some time before moving on to the next obsession.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m reading Moveable Feasts by Sarah Murray, a writer for The Financial Times. The book imagines a trip through a supermarket to purchase ten items and uses each of the ten items to explore the journeys food takes from producer to consumer and in this context, “journey” may imply more than the simply geographic. I recommend it.

The first item in her metaphorical shopping cart is olive oil and there were more than a couple of places in this chapter that sparked “aha” moments. One was a perfectly logical explanation for the shape of amphorae, but we need to step back a little.

Olive oil is a fundamental element of nearly all cuisines surrounding the Mediterranean. Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Middle Eastern, and North African cooking all are heavily dependent upon olive oil. Olive oil is used for cooking, preserving, and flavoring. It’s the base element upon which other ingredients are added and it’s the finishing touch to complete a dish.

It turns out that this has been true for a very, very long time.  By the time the Roman Republic emerged (~ 509 BCE) olive oil was already central to the diet of most of the Mediterranean area and techniques of mass production and distribution were improving all the time.  To give you an idea of just how much olive oil was at the center of ancient Roman life, the average Roman used 50 liters of olive oil in a year.  The average Italian today uses 17 liters.

And now for a couple of those “aha” moments.  There were 1,000,000 or so people living in ancient Rome at the time, but unlike other large cities of the ancient world, there was little industry in Rome and it wasn’t a local market town, either.  In other words, those million Romans were consumers, not producers and this may make it the first “modern” city in that sense. It meant that food and all the other materials of life had to be brought from someplace else to Rome to feed, clothe, and shelter all those Romans.

If you think about that for a second, that casts an entirely new light on the size and majesty of the imperial forums (including Trajan’s Market) and the road systems of ancient Rome. When I was taught the history of ancient Rome (at the time, we weren’t as far removed from the events in question) the expansion of the Roman empire was always explained in terms of imperial aggrandizement and power politics. Couldn’t the motivation of the empire also be explained, though, as an attempt o provide a stable and secure source of food for city of Rome and the Romans?

To get back to olive oil, where does it come from? We have this image of an old, wizened Italian farmer hand-picking olives from an ancient tree on a sunbaked hill in Tuscany, while Diane Lane hangs her laundry in the background and somewhere down the line that olive is transformed into a uniquely delicious oil filling an artisanal bottle so Diane Lane can drizzle some on her caprese salad.  Even if we come to olive oil through French or Turkish cuisine, there is still this idyllic rural Italian image hovering in the shadows. It doesn’t quite work that way.

Today, the largest producer of olive oil in the world is Spain. According to the UN’s  statistical database, Spain is responsible for 58% of the world’s olive oil. Number 2 is Italy at 10%. That’s a huge difference and things really haven’t changed all that much in 2,500 years.  Now imagine you are a consul or general or a wealthy businessman in Rome and you see a million Romans who need 50 liters (13 gallons) of olive oil a year and you see Hispania (most of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar) covered with olive trees just waiting to converted to oil. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that incorporating those olive trees into the empire makes a lot of sense, and Hispania was one of the first and certainly one of the most productive provinces of ancient Rome.

And this brings us back to the amphorae. What’s the most efficient way to get that oil from Hispania to Rome?  Obviously shipping is involved (it’s a long way from the Hispania over the Pyrenees, across southern Gaul, over the Alps, and down to Rome, even without Hannibal’s elephants) but how do you maximize the amount of oil you can put on a ship? The amphorae were the answer. The shape is rounded to follow the shape of the ship’s hull but the basic design is ingenious for maximizing the product in the hold.  So imagine the first layer looks something like this, in the very bottom of the hold (and excuse the drawing skill, please). Three more can be snugly laid on top, and then more, and more, and so on.

Since they all fit so snugly, they don’t have to be lashed down keep them from moving, you don’t have to put in shelves or floors, and you can get a lot of amphorae on one ship. And while it might take a lot of work to load a ship’s hull with amphorae and even more to unload it and deliver the unloaded amphorae, there was no shortage of slaves to handle that kind of manual labor. Maximizing the capacity of the ship was more important than the maximizing the efficiency of labor, at least at this time.

It also turns out that these amphorae were stamped with the producers of the oil, giving the authorities a way to guarantee that what was ordered was also received and giving future archaeologists a way to reconstruct business relationships and measure commercial activity that took place 2,500 years ago. In fact, Murray opens her book at an archaeological dig at Monte Testaccio in Rome, essentially a 50 meter high rubbish heap composed entirely of smashed amphorae tossed on the pile over a few hundred years, each amphorae potentially providing information about the commercial activity of the Roman-Hispania olive trade. The passion of the chief archaeologist  in her story is absolutely palpable.

This brings this part of our story to an end. The mystery of the shape of the amphorae is solved, but I learned so much more in the process. Remember how impressed my true love and I were by Trajan’s Market on our recent trip to Rome. One thing you don’t see in historic ruins (or any historic monument or building, for that matter) is all the stuff that filled the space. We understand that the hundreds, if not thousands, of people and animals engaged in the act of buying, selling, and distributing food are missing from the acres of ruins of Rome. Trajan’s Market would have been packed with amphorae filled with olive oil, along with whatever it was that conveyed wheat (or flour), oranges, fish, meat, and so on.  Just how did the people of Rome get what they needed to sustain life and how did this help determine how Rome worked? How did this effect the empire? If Hispania was conquered for it’s oil, was there a food-related reason for Gaul (France)? or Brittania? And while we are speculating about the possibility of food-driven empire expansion, what exactly were these million Romans eating and how did they cook it?

This is all a little beyond me right now, but these are the kind of questions I love pursuing and I will be trying to chase some of them down. In the meantime, I’m still fascinated by olive oil itself and will be writing a little more in the next few days about olive oil from a couple of different perspectives.  See you then.