Olive Oil Cooperative
Olive trees are spread out all over the island. It’s one of the images that will stay with me forever, the rows and rows of olive trees of varying ages wherever I went throughout the countryside on Djerba. Scores appear in groves; but every family seems to have some in their yard. Olives are a mainstay of the diet, offered even at breakfast; and Djerbian families consume a lot of olive oil each year. They use it in cooking or for dipping bread.I wanted to see if women were involved in work in the cooperatives; but they are not. The Djerbian population is descended from early Berbers and remains conservative. Women remain assigned to traditional female tasks associated with the home and family: sewing, cooking, and tending of family lands. They, and the whole family, pick olives when they are ripe. Nonetheless, it is men who transport the harvested crop to the factories in sacks and men who run the plant. A family gets a certain amount of money in payment for every so many liters of olive oil produced from its contribution. Olives are washed, sorted, crushed, and pressed. At the end, translucent light green oil pours out of the vat’s spigot. Local families can buy oil from the cooperative; what is left over gets sent to larger factories in Tunis, where it is sold to the larger Tunisian market or exported.
What’s advantageous about olive oil from Djerba is that is prepared from handpicked olives, ripened in the sun on the trees, and subsequently transported to a local cooperative, where it is pressed and put into containers on site. It has the variety and rich taste of local production, with olives coming from numerous growers. La Medina is the brand name for the oil produced at the plant I visited near El May. It’s the time of year for the olive harvest. Women can be seen reaching into the trees; and men position on ladders straining for the yield in the upper branches. A common sight on a warm day, of which there are many on Djerba, groups, usually of women and children with an occasional man, often sit together on the ground taking a break or taking time for tea. Typical of the season, the strong distinct scent of pressed olives will suddenly assail the nostrils while driving, a signal that I am on a road near a busy olive oil works.
posted by Carol J. Riphenburg | 11:12 AM
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