There’s an olive tree that’s over 1000 years old in Lebanon and in Crete, one reportedly still thrives after four millennia. What’s pressed from this fruit is so valuable that olive oil fraud was a problem for Ancient Romans back in 2400 BCE. It’s still a criminal issue today – comparable to cocaine trafficking 'with none of the risks'.
Ancient Greek athletes were awarded litres of the fuel and it plays a crucial role in cuisines around the world.
It's as old as wine. It's very, very special.Chef Ibrahim Kasif
The health glow around olive oil has led to celebrities drinking it on social media. Should we follow the influencer hype?
So, yes, olive oil is good. Would I have shots of it? No.Dietitian Dr Evangeline Mantzioris
For a health expert’s opinion on these viral claims, Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia, offers us facts on this cooking staple, and talks about its many cultural purposes, from lighting lamps in the Greek Orthodox Church to cleaning the Sydney Opera House with olive oil.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation, I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country
Ibrahim Kasif: You know olive oil is, it's as old as wine. It's very, very special.
Sarah Asciutto: And he made up this concoction of the fresh extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and lemon juice. And I had to sip it down over, like, the space of an hour. I was essentially drinking a very potent salad dressing. [Laughs]
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So, yes, olive oil is good. Would I have shots of it? No.
Lee Tran Lam: For thousands of years, we’ve used olive oil for everything: from lighting lamps to chasing bugs out of our ears. Ancient Greek athletes were awarded litres of the fuel, and today, celebrities claim olive oil shots will do wonders for your health. But what is this prized ingredient really capable of?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on olive oil.
From Argentinean chimichurri to Spanish pan con tomate, we’ve drizzled and spooned olive oil onto dishes around the world. This fat is so valuable that criminals sell counterfeit versions. It also played a role in King Charles’ coronation and appears in Olympic torch fuel. Olive oil has been pressed by everyone from inmates to monks – but bottles of it haven’t always been embraced in Australia. Credit migrants from the Mediterranean for turning it into the pantry staple it is today.
Ibrahim Kasif: Hi, I'm Ibrahim Kasif. I am the head chef of Nour in Sydney. I've been a chef for 20 years.
Lee Tran Lam: Ibrahim says olive oil’s been a big part of his life – but when his Turkish-Cypriot grandmother migrated to Australia, it was tough to find this cooking essential, let alone prepare Turkish food her husband expected.
Ibrahim Kasif: My grandmother came to this country in the 1950s. My poor grandmother had to find a way to replicate the traditional Turkish dishes that he loved in a country where she couldn't speak the language. You can imagine the marketplaces back in the ’50s in Australia. They just did not have the ingredients that we take for granted today. She was quite savvy with certain things. But where she got stuck was – no olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: Australia’s first olive trees were planted over 200 years ago and they’re still alive today – you can see them at Sydney’s Elizabeth Farm.
Around the 1850s, a Spanish monk started an olive grove in New Norcia, Western Australia, and its oil continues to be sold in 2025.
In 1870, our first “commercially successful” olive oil press was launched at Adelaide Gaol. The prisoners planted olive trees and produced “first class” oil, says the Australian Food Timeline site.
But it took over a century for local olive oil production to really gain momentum. Cookbook authors endorsed dripping and lard over olive oil, due to price, and Australian olive oils struggled to compete against cheaper imports until a few decades ago. In the meantime, olive oil was found in chemists – not supermarkets – ’cos it was considered an earache remedy.
Ibrahim Kasif: She happened to be in the pharmacy and find these little bottles. They weren’t like the one-litre bottles or anything that we could find today – little bottles, like, you know how you buy lavender oil or tea tree oil? Like those little bottles, they were just tiny. [Laughs] It was like the best she could find, initially. And then she would have to, you know, [in] very broken English and try ask for larger bottles and they were like, why does this person want so much, so much oil?
Olive oil back then, it was just [used for] home remedies, like rub it on your tummy if you've got a sore tummy or if you've got like dry skin – it was just like home remedy stuff. They didn't even know what the olive oil was for. It was so funny to hear the stories, it just sounds so bizarre
Lee Tran Lam: Joseph Abboud, who runs Melbourne’s Rumi restaurant, had similar experiences with his family, Alecia Simmonds wrote in Gourmet Traveller. In her history of Middle Eastern food in Australia, she recalls Lebanese immigrants who arrived at Sydney airport in 1950 with some well-travelled olive oil – which sadly leaked through a cardboard box “in a steady stream at the Customs desk”.
This Mediterranean staple was hard to find in Australia and Ibrahim’s grandmother credits Greek and Italian migrants for making olive oil available beyond pharmacies.
Ibrahim Kasif: Very much thanks to them, she was able to, she'd go to the markets and she was able to get the olive oil off them.
Lee Tran Lam: Olive oil is key to a special Turkish style of braising vegetables.
Ibrahim Kasif: Zeytinyağli, it means – zeytin is olive, yağli is oil. So zeytinyağlii is actually a method, where they cook the vegetable in a lot of olive oil. They just poach it slowly in this really heavy oil and water stock, it might have tomatoes in it, it might have lots of herbs, it might have lots of lemon juice in it. That's a method of cooking vegetables and that method is is much loved by Turkish people.
Lee Tran Lam: Tending to vegetables in this slow, olive-oil-rich way makes them luscious, tender, and bright as summer.
Ibrahim Kasif: And the best thing about it is you usually get these dishes cold. So they either get put in the fridge and you eat them the next day or later on that day. And it just plays a part of the Turkish table. It could be ah may it could be eaten as a main course. It could be eaten as a side dish.
Lee Tran Lam: He recalls the citrus tang and garlic-scented air as his grandmother braised broad beans in olive oil – beans so young and soft, you could eat their pods as well. Watch him make this on the spring episode of Food Safari Earth on SBS.
Ibrahim Kasif: My favourite thing in the world when I was a young young boy, and still to this day, is I love beans cooked really slowly and just served at room temperature as a mezze.
Lee Tran Lam: He also loves a sun-dried olive oil unique to Cyprus. It’s made from olives that are cooked, then carefully dried in the sun until raisin-like. The name translates as black oil.
Ibrahim Kasif: It's such a dark colour. The flavour is super intense, but it's the most delicious olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: So what does this Cypriot sun-dried olive oil taste like?
Ibrahim Kasif: The closest thing that people would have to that experience would be olives on a pizza, but roasted even further, and dryer and more intense. Caramel's a good way to describe it, the flavour's just super, super rich, super earthy. It just feels like an olive on steroids, to be honest.
Lee Tran Lam: I’ve heard of Japanese olive oil that smells like carnations and tastes like cherries, French drizzles that evoke nearby lavender fields and Australian versions with a distinct eucalyptus taste.
When award-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha fled the horrors of the war in Gaza, he described being overseas and dipping bread and feta in olive oil. “It smelled of the trees that grew the olives, and it tasted like Gaza," he wrote in The New Yorker.
Olive trees can thrive for a long time – and while it’s hard to date them with certainty, scientists believe there’s an olive tree over 1000 years old in Lebanon, while a tree in Crete apparently still produces olives after four millennia.
Ibrahim Kasif: It's a pretty special ingredient. These olive trees are, there are some real ancient trees in parts of the world that would be hard to for us to understand and fathom, how old these plants are and what they mean to communities, what they mean to cultures. It's a pretty amazing ingredient.
You know olive oil is, it's as old as wine. It's very, very special.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s also a joy in desserts – drizzled on everything from ice-cream to a Turkish dessert Ibrahim makes with coconut, labneh and passionfruit.
Ibrahim Kasif: The olive oil is there to just round it off. It just elevates little tones of coconut and and passionfruit.
Lee Tran Lam: A great olive oil can transform a dish and even revive some old bread or some sad tomatoes.
Ibrahim Kasif: You can get a piece of meat, high quality piece of meat, just season it with salt and some olive oil. And cook it, finish it again with salt and olive oil.
Or a vegetable, same thing. You can cook some leeks on the barbecue or you can cook beans. They're asking, what did you do with it? You know, you've got high quality olive oil, and you've got this really beautiful ingredient that's in season. You're 90 per cent of the way there. The rest is just, it's all God's work, really. You don't really have to do anything else except just cook it the best you can and it will look after itself.
Lee Tran Lam: Let’s hear from someone who oversees olive oil at all stages, from the grove to the bottle.
Sarah Asciutto: Hi, my name is Sarah Asciutto and I work for Rio Vista Olives in South Australia. We've got two groves, one in the Adelaide Hills and one in the Murraylands. I'm also an olive oil sommelier.
I don't remember a time without olive oil. My family was just a normal Italian family, where it was just used in everyday life. We grew up in country South Australia, so it wasn't always easy to find a good quality extra virgin olive oil. We did have a local company called Viva Olives actually start up when I was a child. And I think that changed the whole region's understanding of good quality extra virgin olive oil.
That was really exciting for us to see the olives being grown and connecting with the product.
And then as we got older, my husband's grandfather, his nonno, used to go out and pick the olives with some of his friends every year.
And that became our olive oil supply. And he actually got to a point where he was like, nup, getting too old, can't do this anymore. And so my husband said, hey, nonno, don't stop. We're going to help you.
And my family actually jumped on, too. And that actually became the birth of this passion within our family for olive oil. That's when we actually bought our first grove after that. So it went from being an integral part of our food to now becoming our whole life.
Lee Tran Lam: In fact, her family has been making olive oil professionally for several years now.
Sarah Asciutto: My dad and my brother took over Rio Vista Olives in 2016. And that was from an Italian family that had hand-planted all their trees beforehand.
We had purchased a grove of olive trees in the Adelaide Hills. But we had no control over how we pressed it. It was just trees. When Rio Vista Olives came up for sale, it was this opportunity to have control over the whole quality level of the food. They had the press already there, they had the additional trees, everything was set up ready to go.
We actually had another sensory analyst come in. We've got, I think, 18 varieties between the two groves of olives. This sensory analyst sat us down and she talked us through sort of tasting each variety of oil. And that was a real blow-your-mind moment for all of us because it was this case of ‘wow, like this one's fruity, it has tropical notes’ or ‘this one's got grassy notes’ or ‘this one's got artichoke or tomato vine’ and you've got this whole process of your mind going picking up these flavours and appreciating it.
Lee Tran Lam: At Sydney’s Aalia restaurant, Paul Farag makes eggplant mes'a'aha inspired by the recipe his Egyptian dad cooked for him thousands of times while growing up: it’s rich with olive oil, tomato and fried eggplant and hums with warm spices.
Paul was named Chef of the Year at the recent Good Food Guide awards and he collaborates with Sarah on an oil pressed from barnea and koroneiki olives.
Sarah Asciutto: Paul obviously has got that Egyptian Greek background and food, I think, is his lifeblood.
He really wanted to make this expression of his heritage. So the barnea is a Middle Eastern variety. The barnea that we grow here, we do a really early pick, and it gives it a real nice grassy green, catches-your-throat flavour note, which Paul loves in his food.
Koroneiki is that little tiny Greek variety, very fruity, very fragrant, can also have that nice grassy note to it as well. So sort of that amalgamation of the two was something that he felt expressed his heritage and expressed the flavours that he uses.
Lee Tran Lam: The barnea olive has a peppery flavour profile and Paul says some diners with Arab backgrounds try his olive oil and tell him – this tastes like home.
The bottle’s classical design also showcases his heritage: the label is based on a pharoah named Khafre, with the falcon-shaped god Horus by his side.
Rio Vista Olives also makes an oil I first tried when chef Raymond Hou poured it over his buttermilk panna cotta with strawberries and white balsamic at Sydney restaurant Firepop. This golden splash of Hardy’s Mammoth olive oil was so reviving – bracing and sweet, like a passionfruit on the edge of being ripe. I couldn’t quite believe it.
Sarah Asciutto: So it's actually a South Australian variety. It was developed by Thomas Hardy. It's known for having those flavour profiles naturally within it. So you're always getting like guava, passionfruit, sometimes even a bit of that golden kiwi sort of note. It's a very pretty, I would say very pretty tasty tropical style oil.
It can differ between soils – olive oil is a lot like wine. Each variety of olive is like your varieties of grape. You can get your shiraz, your cabernet, your semillon, your chardonnay. And they are going to be quite different. And I think we haven't always appreciated that. So I think it's fantastic these chefs drilling down onto different varieties and what they can offer to a dish, because you never would have heard of before pouring, like you said, olive oil over a panna cotta. But that Hardy's Mammoth just lends itself with that. It's fragrant. It's floral. It's fruity. And it just lifts the dish in a way that another ingredient couldn't do that. And even it adds that textural element, that creaminess.
Lee Tran Lam: Like wine, the landscape makes a difference.
Sarah Asciutto: Soil does play a part in the flavours of an olive oil. We've even got, on our own grove between two different [locations] – one in the Adelaide Hills and one on the Murraylands – same variety, and they all taste completely different.
Lee Tran Lam: And Sarah would know: she trained to become an olive oil sommelier.
Sarah Asciutto: For a year, every month, you had different olive oils sent out. And you had to assess them and taste them and study them to really get your palate going. It's also a process of, in your everyday, just tasting and smelling everything.
That course really just opened up your mind to assessing, even checking for faults in oil. Sometimes when people haven't stored their olive oil correctly, you can get like a real rancid note, like stale nuts or it can almost have like a bit of a winey, vinegary note.
Lee Tran Lam: So store olive oil in a dark part of your pantry, away from heat.
As cookbook author Emiko Davies says in her newsletter, note Elizabeth Romer’s advice on how to handle olive oil: “treat it like an expensive scent,” she writes in The Tuscan Year. “Use it when it is fresh and new. Nothing will be gained by hoarding it in the larder until its flavour has started to deteriorate.”
Or until it’s like used Band-Aids – I’ve heard that’s one of many flavours listed on tasting wheels that olive oil judges reference.
Sarah Asciutto: You can get things like smoked bacon. You can get wet wood, rubber, mushrooms, wet cardboard, hay, salami – stale nuts is always the big one.
Some that you'll come across, they actually have almost an overly fruity, like stewed fruit note.
And that can actually be a fault too.
Lee Tran Lam: Is it true that baby vomit appears as a flavour reference on the olive oil tasting wheel?
Sarah Asciutto: Fetid milk, yeah, baby vomit. You've got mouldy hay. Blue cheese. Vanilla custard, nail polish.
And you kind of wonder, because you're like, how could that even be in there? But we recently had a competition that I'd been invited to judge at, and there was one with the fetid milk.
And I was like, well, there it is.
Lee Tran Lam: Has Sarah ever tasted an olive oil that seemed like nail polish?
Sarah Asciutto: Solvent, yeah. I've had not the nail polish so much, but like, the solvent sort of notes to it. You're not expecting that. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: As for other unpleasant surprises, if cockroaches or other bugs ever crawl into your ear, reach for an olive oil bottle.
Ear, nose and throat specialist Adam Blond told the ABC that "oil suffocates them and stops them from moving around and they're essentially dead”.
Has Sarah heard of other leftfield uses for this cooking fat?
Sarah Asciutto: Actually when I first started dating my husband, I was sick and his nonno had said, I'll fix you. I'll fix you.
And he made up this concoction of fresh extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and lemon juice. And I had to sip it down over like the space of an hour. I was essentially drinking a very potent salad dressing. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: Did this powerful salad dressing work on her illness?
Sarah Asciutto: It did help – not that I'd ever admit it. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: Not all home remedies are effective: eczema organisations warn against moisturising with olive oil, for instance, because it’s not great for the skin barrier.
It can be confusing, working out when drizzling, pouring and rubbing this pantry staple is good for you. So let’s make sense of this with a health expert.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I'm Dr Evangeline Mantzioris. I'm the Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of South Australia. And an accredited practicing dietitian and an accredited sports dietitian.
My background's Greek and olive oil is big in Greece.
My parents migrated here in the ’50s, when olive oil wasn't at all available in the supermarkets.
When my parents first came out, they lived in a shared house with other new migrant couples, and they shared everything in the kitchen – except the olive oil.
Every couple had their own containers, and my mother would even go and put pen marks on where the level of olive oil was in her container. Because I think the worst thing that could happen in a share house back then was someone else used your olive oil.
The other thing I remember is my parents being suspicious about the olive oil they would buy. Was it really olive oil? Had it been, you know, adulterated and had some other cheap, horrible oil added to it? And so there was a little investigation before they would open up their first – because they would buy it in cans and they would put a bit in a cup and freeze it and put it in the freezer. And if it went completely solid, then they were happy it was olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: Given that olive oil fraud has existed for thousands – yes, thousands! – of years, they were right to be paranoid.
Ancient Roman inspectors were checking fakes back in 2400 BCE and the European Union has seen record levels of olive oil fraud recently.
Passing off cheaper adulterated blends for olive oil is very profitable when olive oil prices have more than doubled in recent years due to drought and other factors. The Guardian reports Italian officials seized knock-off olive oil worth €250,000 in November 2023.
Tom Mueller, author of “Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil,” was told by one EU investigator that the crime of olive oil fraud was “comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks.”
When Dr Evangeline’s household was growing up, this ingredient was highly valued, too.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Olive oil was big. It certainly made us different from the rest of the population, I think, because it was all about where do you get your olive oil from?
I remember a couple of times people would say, but do you cook with olive oil? And mum would go, ‘well, yes’. And they’d go, ‘oh, sorry, we don't eat olive oil. It's too heavy for us!’ And I was like ‘what?’ My mum was like, ‘what are they going on about?’
It defined the Mediterranean households from the non-Mediterranean households, and how it was used and how life almost revolved around olive oil. You know, if my parents travelled to Greece, they'd bring back Greek olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: This staple has been a Mediterranean essential for ages: it was lamp fuel and ancient Olympic athletes rubbed themselves in the fat.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I have heard about the athletes with the Olympians. I'm not surprised about lighting up lamps. In the Greek Orthodox Church, where we have oil lamps, the oil that's used for that is always olive oil. In individual houses who have what we call an iconostasis, where they've got their icons, they would use olive oil to light the lamp for that as well. I mean, look, it's been used for centuries and centuries, hasn't it?
Lee Tran Lam: It’s also key to the Mediterranean diet, says Dr Evangeline, citing the Seven Countries Study, launched by Ancel Keys.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: And the seven countries he had was the US, Finland, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and Japan. And at that stage in nutrition science research, the belief was that the lower the fat, the better.
Lee Tran Lam: The Seven Countries study began in 1958, ran for decades and involved 12,000 participants. It show that although the Greek diet was high in fat – particularly olive oil – this actually helped lower cardiovascular and cancer risks.
Whereas the Finnish had poor coronary rates due to their high intake of saturated animal fats, with The New York Times reporting that “the Finns often spread butter on their cheese”.
The Seven Countries study showed it wasn’t the amount of fat you consumed, but type of fat – and olive oil is high in monounsaturated fat, which is healthier.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: And since then, there have been a whole lot of studies looking at olive oil, Med diet and health.
Lee Tran Lam: Extra virgin olive oil is the highest quality olive oil and retains the most health benefits.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: For people who go olive oil tasting, they'll be aware that one of the signs of an extra virgin olive oil is when you consume it, you get that little bit of burning at the back of your throat, that peppery taste. Well, that peppery taste comes from a molecule called oleocanthal. And this is actually an anti-inflammatory agent. And it helps to block the inflammatory mediators in your body, like a lot of the drugs that we take that stop inflammation.
Lee Tran Lam: In fact, it’s been compared to anti-inflammatory drug Ibuprofen.
Other health benefits of olive oil include lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer and dementia.
In fact, Rio Vista Olives had worked with chef Jason Roberts to raise money for Dementia Australia, by bottling an olive oil blend with a high amount of polyphenols – this compound has been linked with decreasing the risk of dementia. One observational study of over 90,000 adults revealed promising results in this area.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: And it showed that as little as seven grams of olive oil a day was beneficial.
Lee Tran Lam: The health glow around olive oil has led to celebrities promoting olive oil shots on social media. Should we follow the influencer hype?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Yes, olive oil is good. Would I have shots of it? No.
Why? Because I'm a big believer in that food should be enjoyable, appetising. And I'm not suggesting having a shot of olive oil won't be enjoyable, but I think it's a whole lot nicer – even if you have bread that you dip it with. With vinegar, which is one of my favourite things – you know, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and bread. Or if you put it on top of a salad, or if you've got a nice stew that you've cooked or if you're having a pizza and it comes out of the oven and you put some olive oil and Parmesan on it. That's the reason I wouldn't have it [as a shot]. And also this idea of having shots of it almost sort of is chasing it just for its nutritional benefits, not for what joy it brings to the other meals.
Lee Tran Lam: On The Conversation, nutrition expert Hazel Flight says a two-tablespoon olive oil shot comprises “19% of the recommended daily intake” and it’s better to spread small amounts of the fat throughout the day. And influencer claims about olive oil don’t all hold up either.
Now, what about the fear around the smoke point of olive oil.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: We did a body of research a couple of years ago and that did come up as a reason as to why people didn't want to use olive oil in frying. It's not anything for people to worry about.
Chef Adam Liaw concurs on the Good Food site: home cooks generally heat oil in a pan “for a short time and at temperatures lower than the smoke point of the oils we use”. He also calls olive oil “a great cooking oil”.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I certainly – not that I own a deep fryer – but I wouldn't put it in a deep fryer and deep-fry things in there, because it's so much oil to waste. So you can, you know, shallow-fry a whole lot easier and not be worried about having that. I also worked in a burns unit and I saw all the accidents that came in with deep-frying. So there's many reasons I choose not to deep-fry. But yeah, shallow-frying is going to be effective. Roasting vegetables in the oven with olive oil is great. It adds so much flavour. And even when my kids were really young, they would just consume so much vegies that were cooked with the olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: What about fearmongering that suggests you should avoid olive oil because it’s a fat?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: That probably all started in the eighties, I think. It was all ‘low fat this, low fat that, fat’s bad for you’ and you still hear it. People say, ‘I’ll have the low fat’, ‘oh yeah, I'm eating it because it's low fat.’
Lee Tran Lam: The current Australian Dietary Guidelines make the distinction of limiting “saturated fat” and recommending monounsaturated fats – like olive oil.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: What that Seven Country Study showed us is that it's not the total fat that's the problem. It's the type of fat that's the problem. And we repeatedly see that saturated fats are problematic. It's the saturated fats we should be most concerned about that come from animal origin or trans fats. So it's the saturated fat that's been linked with increased risk of heart disease, increased inflammatory reactions in the body as well. So try and reduce the intake of that.
Lee Tran Lam: My favourite olive oil story comes from Steve Tsoukalas, who began working at the Sydney Opera House in 1968 – before it was even finished. He maintained the building for half a century and inspired by his Greek grandmother, he pioneered lo-fi ways of cleaning the Opera House – like using olive oil on the bronze railings. These methods have been upheld long after his 2018 retirement as its longest-serving employee.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: My daughter's in-laws, who are Maltese, tell the story of when they used to go fishing. They would pour a bit of olive oil in the water so they could see more clearly through the water. There are many usesforf olive oil. Like every food ingredient, there is always going to be uses. But the Opera House? Yeah. [Laughs] That's a lot of olive oil, isn’t it? It’s huge. I guess it would give it a nice shine, wouldn't it?
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re seasoning our food with all kinds of salt, from Japanese curry to pepperberry. Follow on your favourite podcast app and if you liked this episode, why not share a review that reveals how olive oil fuels your days.
