Useless Olive Oil Trivia

It's the era of content creators, TikTok, virality and memes, and the internet seems to have an obsession with giving you a lot of information that is ultimately fairly useless. But that's not going to stop us from adding to the noise. The below might come in handy for a game of Trivial Pursuit or when you’re trying to impress the in-laws over dinner. Or you might just read it and then decide to buy some olive oil. Either works for us.

1. Olives are a fruit and not a vegetable. An olive tree produces a “drupe”, which is a type of fruit similar to plums, peaches, cherries and mangos that have a hard seed inside a soft outer core.  
    
2. In Ancient Greece, olive oil was used as sunscreen, to treat ear infections, as burial offerings, to light their lamps, and as perfume. For the record, we wouldn’t recommend any of these for Supper Supply EVOO – except maybe perfume, given it smells so damn enticing.
    
3. The average lifespan of olive trees is over 500 years old. And get this – the oldest known olive tree out there is 1500 years old – planted when the Roman Empire was in the midst of collapsing (made you think about it).
    
4. The olive branch is a symbol of peace because the goddess Athena beat Poseidon in a contest created by Zeus for the best “offering” by presenting an olive branch to him to win control of Athens.  That was a fair chunk of Greek mythology summed up in one pretty clunky sentence. 
    
5. The global olive oil industry is expected to reach 20.5 billion USD by 2032. That’s larger than the current GDP of about 50 nations worldwide. The people out there just can’t get enough of it. Buy some now - go on!