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Lädt ... Olive Odyssey: Searching for the Secrets of the Fruit That Seduced the Worldvon Julie Angus
   Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  VivienneR | Sep 28, 2014 | 
As Julie Angus points out early in "Olive Odyssey," "whereas vines can barely reach a hundred years old, the longevity of olive trees allows us to eat and make oil from fruit of the very same tree that nourished people two millennia ago." Exploring this remarkable continuity is at the heart of Ms. Angus's odyssey, which in true Homeric fashion she undertakes with an actual sailboat on real salt seas. To complete his nostos, his journey home, the hero Odysseus had to brave sirens, cranky gods, a Cyclops and the horrors of Scylla and Charybdis. Julie Angus's odyssey reads a bit more like a vacation, and it's easy to wonder if this book wasn't the excuse for an elaborate sailing jaunt. After all, the olive grows in some of the most ruggedly beautiful places on earth. The quest requires Ms. Angus and her husband to unfurl their sails along the Costa Brava and the Côte d'Azur and to pull into harbor at places like Cassis, Cannes, Antibes, Corsica and Sardinia. After that, they ditch the sailboat and visit equally desirable Umbria, Crete and Israel. But if anyone is qualified to wring travail and adventure out of these unreasonably glamorous locales, it is Julie Angus. She was the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean from mainland to mainland (in hurricane season, no less). And she is trained as a molecular biologist, so she has got the scientific acumen to decipher the nuances of the olive genome and to explain why one sort of DNA is more reliable than another for studying tree genetics. On top of all that, Ms. Angus does her sailing and olive-chasing while adjusting to life as a new mother. "Olive Odyssey" oozes facts and statistics, at times to the point of redundancy, when Ms. Angus's personal story feels only loosely grafted on. But it is a pleasure to try to keep up with this book; like its author, it covers an enormous amount of territory. By the end of "Olive Odyssey," the samples that Ms. Angus has collected provide "the most conclusive evidence" yet that cultivated olives originated in the Middle East and were spread across the Mediterranean by Phoenicians. But Ms. Angus never makes it home. Her book ends rather abruptly, her nostos incomplete. The Arab Spring spills over into Syria, and violence there makes it impossible to return to the family trees. Gunfire is now heard among Syrian olives. People on the run from Assad's forces hide in her family's groves, using the silver leaves as cover while en route across the border to Turkey. This lends a final poignancy to Ms. Angus's voyage, not to mention her hymn to the tree that has been a "silent witness to mankind's great achievements and follies." Auszeichnungen
When Julie Angus visits her relatives in Syria, where they continue a centuries-old tradition of making olive oil, she understands that the olive is at the very core of who they are. Her curiosity piqued, she begins to wonder about the origins and history of this fruit that has meant so much to them. Angus, her husband, and their ten-month-old son embark on a Mediterranean voyage to retrace the route of the Phoenicians and discover who ate the first olive and learned to make oil from it, why it became such an influential commodity for many of the greatest civilizations, and how it expanded from its earliest roots in the Middle East. As they sail the dazzling waters of the Mediterranean, Angus and her husband collect samples from ancient trees, testing them to determine where the first olive tree originated. They also feast on inky black tapenades in Cassis, nibble on codfish and chickpeas creamed in olive oil in Sardinia, witness the harvesting of olives in Greece, and visit perhaps the oldest olive tree in the world, on Crete. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)641.3Technology Home and family management Food And Drink FoodKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3)
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There is no shortage of interesting information in the book but mostly it is in snippets, often repetitive, lost amid the the scientific story and the personal story. The sailing adventure, the Mediterranean locale, the family involvement did not make the book more engrossing, in fact it detracted from the point; made the story neither fish nor fowl, neither academic nor general interest. After claiming that there is so much fraudulent olive oil around, tests to determine if your extra virgin olive oil is the real deal were inconclusive. Apparently only the taste test is of any use. However, she did include a good section on how to perform a taste test, what to look for, what to avoid. An appendix provides a handful of fairly ordinary recipes using olives or oil that seem like an afterthought. A planned a visit to her father's family in Syria is where the book ended abruptly because of the current violence there.
It should have been an interesting account and yet I found it disappointing. (