Diets That May Restrict or Exclude This Food
Low-fat diet
Low-sodium diet
Buying This Food
Look for: Tightly sealed bottles or cans. Small olives are less woody than large ones. Green
olives have a more astringent taste than black olives. Greek olives, available only in bulk,
have a sharp, spicy taste. Pitted olives are the best buy if you want to slice the olives into a
salad, otherwise olives with pits are less-expensive and a better buy.
Storing This Food
Store unopened cans or jars of olives on a cool, dry shelf. Once you open a can of olives, take
the olives out of the can and refrigerate them in a clean glass container.
Preparing This Food
Olives will taste less salty if you bathe them in olive oil before you use them.
What Happens When You Cook This Food
How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
Pressing. Olives are pressed to produce olive oil, one of the few vegetable oils with a
distinctive flavor and aroma. Olive oils are graded according to the pressing from which
they come and the amount of free oleic acid they contain. (The presence of free oleic acid
means that the oil’s molecules have begun to break down.) Virgin olive oil is oil from the
first pressing of the olives. Pure olive oil is a mixture of oils from the first and second press-
ings. Virgin olive oil may contain as much as 4 percent free oleic acid. Fine virgin olive oil
may contain 3 percent free oleic acid, superfine virgin olive oil 1.5 percent, and extra virgin
olive oil 1 percent.
Olive oil is a more concentrated source of alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) than olives.
Because it is high in unsaturated fatty acids, whose carbon atoms have double bonds that
can make room for more oxygen atoms, olive oil oxidizes and turns rancid fairly quickly if
exposed to heat or light. To protect the oil, store it in a cool, dark cabinet.
Olives