Olives
And what makes them amazing!
From snacking to cooking, olives are quite common in our everyday lives, but how much do you really know about olives? Even if you already know some good healthy recipes with olives or maybe even a few different types of olives, you’ll enjoy these 5 fun facts about olives!
- OLIVES CHANGE COLOR AS THEY RIPEN
- OLIVES ARE INEDIBLE RIGHT OFF THE TREE
- 90% OF OLIVES BECOME OIL, 10% BECOME TABLE OLIVES
- OLIVE TREES AS A SPECIES ARE BETWEEN 20 MILLION AND 40 MILLION YEARS OLD
- THERE ARE MORE OLIVE TREES IN GREECE THEN PEOPLE
Olives start out green and as they ripen they will change color from green to light brown to red or purple to a dark black. Even though olives will naturally ripen to a black hue, it takes a long time to reach this color, so the majority of the black “ripe” olives you see are picked when they’re green and cured with oxygen and chemicals to achieve their deep black color.
While technically you can eat olives straight off the tree, you don’t want to. Raw olives are extremely bitter and have very different textures then their cured counterparts. The curing process removes the compounds that cause the extreme bitterness and gives an olive the soft and juicy texture we know and love!
The world produces about 20 million tons of olives every year! Green olives are most common for pressing into oil, but some commercial producers use a combination of green olives and black olives. The type of olives used can also depend on how many it takes to get a certain amount of oil as different varieties have a different oil content.
Fossils show that olive trees originated between 20 million and 40 million years ago in the area that is now Italy. It would take a while for us to begin to cultivate them as that only happened about 7,000 years ago in Mediterranean regions.
Greece has about 170 million trees, while the population is only about 10.4 million people as of 2022. There are only 7 countries that have populations greater than the amount of olive trees in Greece.