However, for "fine purposes" we do indulge in the occasional brand of "Extra virgin" olive oil, principally where the olive oil is to be the dominant flavor. For example, on a mesculin (mescaline? masculin?) salad where the only dressing is olive oil and salt and pepper.
It is however generally the case that seemingly simple things like olive oil can harbor a world of complexity. Then there's the world of alternative oils, like walnut oil and what have you (esp. toasted sesame oil). Most recently we tried grape-seed oil (not to be confused with rapeseed oil, aka huile de ricin) and it seems to do less smoke less fast than olive.
But what is it generally about commodities. Mayonnaise has been commoditized as this weird white stuff. Some years ago I discovered how easy it is to make mayonnaise and concocted some sixty different varieties before I gave up because it's too damn good and too damn fattening. I fear to expand my knowledge of oils in general because they are so devastating on the calorie front.
On the biomass harvest: the yield from the suburban half acre stands at about 2100 gallons for the season (about 70 standard 30 gallon sized trashcans). There is still one tree which has yet to give in to the seasonal impetus, so the number will climb. In a response to the collective action problem our city services picks up leaves. I have never seen anything like it growing up as a suburbanite in Los Angeles (which of course is all suburb). The city won't pay for trash collection. We contract for that as individuals. But our taxes do support a great snorking machine which sloops along the suburban streets and sucks up great rows of piled up leaves. The workers wear filter masks. As the leaves are snorked up they are ground into a fine powder so as to reduce trips to the biomass dump. A great brown exhaust cloud billows over the whole operation. It is one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen.
I am frankly somewhat frightened at the organizational complexity of the suburbs. I had read about it, but now that I am in the 14th month of my actual residency in that environment (as an adult in my 43d year) and see, rather than read, about what goes on, and behold the poweful tax subsidies (deductibility of interest, deductibility of property tax) in place, and experience the horrors of realizing that behind the manicured lawns and rows of leaves their lurk great numbers of Republicans, who in fact control local government, and that, what with the biomass crop to be brought in and everything that I actually have things to discuss (leaf and lawn farming and harvesting technique, for one) with them, and then I see this great apparatus which keeps it all going, social, economic, mechanical, material, I am overawed. It is big, it is vast, it is bigger than any of us. -- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
Fax 518-442-5298