Tom Mueller

Other researchers believe that this ritualized anointing, with its overt celebration of the male body in glistening nudity, contributed to the spread of homosexual love in the Greek world.

law says up to 0.8 percent [free acidity] and no taste defects, that’s it. I think that’s how it should be. How it should be, but not how things are.” He drew a pie chart showing what he considered the real quality of olive oil in the world: 2 percent excellent oil; 8 percent second-tier oil, good but not exceptional; and the remaining 90 percent what he called “so-so oil.

The sign of a good oil, he went on, is the bocca bella (“pretty mouth”), the pleasant taste and clean sensation that remain in the mouth after you’ve swallowed the oil.

Nowadays these terms are largely obsolete, because all true extra virgin oil is made from fresh olives milled at low temperatures, and most of it isn’t pressed at all, but centrifuged.