A ghost haunts Europe: the ghost of a steak cooked with butter and not with olive oil. For any self-respecting Mediterranean, the mere idea of cooking with an ingredient other than the precious liquid gold is aberrant. But it happens that yours (ours) is a minority opinion. There is a gap that tears Europe from north to south, but it is not economic or labor.
It’s about culinary.
And it is personified in this map produced by Landgeist, a publication that analyzes the disparate characteristics of Europe through interesting cartographies. Based on data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), choose two variables (annual per capita consumption of olive oil and butter) and assign each country a color (green and yellow) depending on your favorite product. The result is a yellow wave that dominates the continent except in the south.
It is there that a handful of countries resist now and forever, in the face of northern customs: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Albania, Greece and Cyprus. Only they are saved. Nothing that can surprise us: nothing more “French” in the Spanish collective imagination than smearing a frying pan with butter and dumping all the food of the day there. The same will have been able to verify any Italian or Greek who has resided in a British or German house. Olive oil is in short supply.
There are historical motifs and climatic to explain the gap. The only exception is Luxembourg, the small duchy straddling France and Germany. A plausible explanation for their preference for olive oil is the strong Portuguese migrant community there (around 16% of the total population). Otherwise, the whole of Europe shows a natural preference for butter.
The palm, in reality, is not taken by Spain or Italy, but by a tiny nation perched in the aftermath of the great Padana plain: San Marino. The country consumes about 24 liters of olive oil per person per year, well ahead of the approximate 12 in Greece, 11.7 in Spain, 8.2 in Italy and 7.9 in Portugal. There is a lot of olive culture of its people, of gastronomic tradition and also of certain production, extolled today in the Terra di San Marino, a local denomination.
Other statistics shed light on the deeply Mediterranean character of olive oil. Morocco and Syria some years ago they slipped into the top ten countries in terms of consumption (around 5 liters per person per year each), while Turkey, Algeria or Tunisia filled the honor roll. The minority position of France is surprising, a Mediterranean country only marginally and historically more attached to the cultural traditions of Western Europe. The dominance of butter in Balkan countries is also striking very mediterranean like Croatia or Montenegro.
All this is appreciated with higher quality when we compare the percentage of global production and consumption of each of the Mediterranean countries. Spain produces 43% of the world’s olive oil and consumes 19% of the total; Italy, 14% and 21% respectively; Greece, 10% and 7%; Portugal, 2% and 3%; Tunisia, 6% and 1.3%; Turkey, 6% and 4%. Far behind are the United Kingdom or Germany (2% each, with 1 and 0.8 liters per head per year). The preponderance of the United States is surprising, with a lot of appetite: they produce 0.19% of the world but consume 9%.
As we see, olive oil is a matter (proudly and exclusively) Mediterranean. The authentic civilization against the generalized barbarism of northern Europe.