Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Vaness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Professor Selena Wong, where I ask her,

How did Olive Oil become the complex stunning, multi-dimensional creature that they are today?

Welcome to Getting Curious with Jonathan Vaness. I am so excited for this week's topic. The it is Olive Oil.

The who is Dr. Selena Wong? Who is an associate professor at UC Davis and the Department of Food Science and Technology?

Between 2011 and 2022, Dr. Wong was the research director of the UC Davis Olive Center.

Welcome. How are you, Dr. Wong? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. My students are so excited.

So thank you for helping me to increase my kumas factor.

Oh, my gosh. Honey, I can tell from even just assume with your cool glasses, your coolness factor was already soaring.

And with your scholarship, it like qualifies that point by like 50 fold. Look at me using like research terms qualifying.

Okay, but wait, hard hitting journalistic question number one. What is Olive Oil?

It's a great question. And it's a really confusing thing for the consumers, right?

I cannot tell you how many times I've gone to the grocery store standing in front of the aisle of oil.

And I see people just stand there and look at all their options and it's very confusing. There's extroversion olive oil.

There's pure olive oil. There is extra light olive oil. And this is just the olive oil category, right?

There's other edible oil categories. But in the US, most of consumers are interested in extroversion olive oil, which is technically fruit juice coming out of the olive.

Fruit. What?

Yeah. So if you think about making orange juice, you take oranges, you squeeze it and the juice come out.

It's basically the same way to make extra virgin olive oil. You take fresh olives.

You basically crush them and then press them and then the oil will come out and that's olive oil.

You know, he added no chemical added during this process that is extra virgin olive oil. And that is different from pure olive oil you buy in the store that is refined that is also different from the extra light olive oil you buy, which is also refined.

And some consumer will confuse extra light olive oil with lower calorie oil. But in reality, they're all the same. It's just the processing is different.

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