Patagonia Olive Oil

Coming soon to supermarket and gourmet stores; watch for it on the shelves. Wednesday night I attended a focus group where we discussed an unknown brand of olive oil, which we'd picked up in unmarked sample bottles and taste-tested for about a week.

I loved it. I loved the golden color. Later, when we saw it in the "real" bottles, it had more of a green tinge to it. But in the small sample plastic bottle, it looked pure gold to me, liquid gold. It said sunshine and luxury, and I could imagine being gently massaged with this oil.

I had never tasted extra virgin olive oil and the stronger taste delighted me. I felt as if I could just slightly taste the olives. Yet the taste didn't linger, and I found myself pouring more and more onto my salads as I ate them. Sure, it's high calorie, but at least olive oil is healthy, so I didn't feel too guilty about eating a lot of it.

The focus group amused me. I was one of those bridge and tunnel people in with the "real" Manhattanites. They are a whole different breed. These people talked about shopping in the overpriced gourmet stores like Dean & DeLuca, where you could pay $3 for an avocado that I can get at a fruit stand for $1.29. These were women who went home after a day's work and made bruschetta, or grilled fish and shrimp. They tried frying chicken in this oil and other types of cooking. All I did, unimaginative little me, was to put it on salad and mop it up with bread (after sprinkling pepper on the oil as it spread across a plate).

The others were much more upscale and conscious of the need to impress their friends. They wouldn't use plastic bottles partly because plastic is bad for the environment, but also because it looks tacky. Only glass bottles for them! I was the one person in favor of plastic because it doesn't break as easily and I live in a family of clutzes who drop bottles with alarming regularity.

They knew what extra virgin and "cold press" or "first press" meant. Listening to this was an education but to some extent I found it an education in food snobbery. Only extra virgin was worth buying. Lesser brands were all right in an ordinary supermarket, but the better brands belonged in a D'Agostino's or in the very trendy gourmet boutiques. People agreed that this unknown brand should be in the gourmet boutiques and named some outrageously high prices for a standard sized bottle.

We learned that the brand is Patagonia and that it is going to be marketed as an ecologically friendly olive oil, coming from unspoiled Patagonia. But one woman whom I found particularly snooty didn't like the slogan: said it was "too easy." They showed us two labels. I liked the blue label better but many other women there preferred the plainish offwhite label that looked boring to me. It was also practically illegible. Also, European foods were much better than American; Americans have no real standards about how food is prepared.

Right, that's why the foreign imports of flu vaccine were found to be ineffective because of bad handling and I had to get a second flu shot this past winter. The American system of monitoring food and drugs is flawed, but so is the European, but I guess these snobs would rather think that America is bad and all things foreign are much better.

I had a fun time discussing the olive oil and I certainly was quite happy to collect my $125 at the end of the session. It was also very amusing watching the trendy crowd, the upscale types who really would discuss Hemingway at a wine and cheese (and olive oil) party do their thing. I went home happy that I am not in that crowd and that I am down to earth enough to simply eat what I like without worrying about what people think of me for my food choices or the type of packaging those food choices come in.