To a first approximation it's accurate to assume any imported olive oil on a grocery store shelf in the US is fraudulent. The only kind I buy now is 100% grown in California and certified by the California Olive Oil Council. And it is very expensive.

Absolutely. Avoid any blends outside the U.S.

Honestly, I don't care about "olive oil fraud" from/within the EU. As long as the final country that bottles it is responsible for food safety, then I am OK with it. Seriously, if you told me that tomatoes were mislabelled from Portugal instead of Spain, I would not care. What are the tangible drawbacks for consumers of mislabelled olive oil from EU?

There was an article about the word enshitification, what you describe the real life example: you are paying a premium price for a product with a lowering quality every year that goes by. Fighting labelling fraud is the correct answer.

If it is written extra virgin olive oil that means a certain oil quality expected in terms of taste. For me that means I can enjoy a non rancid oil on my tasteful tomatoes with real mozzarella di buffalo, and that is a world of difference with making the same salad with tasteless but "tested on rats safe" products

You’re overpaying for poor quality products. Quite simple.

So, if olive oil from Portugal is imported to Italy and bottled and mislabelled as from Italy, this makes it automatically lower quality? This is the kind of virtue signalling bullshit that I reject on HN.

It sounds like you're trying to be angry. I don't see any virtue signaling here except some "holier than thou" from the tone in your comment.

Nobody is claiming that a label magically changes the quality. The comments above are claiming that olive oil from some regions fetch a higher price in the market, ostensibly for good reasons, and that taking something else and claiming it is from that region is fraud. I'm surprised that feels controversial.

    > ostensibly for good reasons

Can you name some of these reasons?

I have no expertise in regional honey or olive oil or any of the other often-counterfeited things but I assume it is something like wine where the region implies terroir, relevant policies/regulations, and long histories of expertise/techniques. For example, I have heard honey is majorly impacted by the regional flowers around where it is produced.

I personally wouldn't know Italian olive oil from Greek from rancid American garbage but if people think they do and they are trying to buy something in particular then ideally they aren't mislead about that.

If something like this is done it’s done to save cost, which almost always correlates with quality.