By Harold McGee
Published 2004
Fresh olives are practically inedible thanks to their ample endowment of a bitter phenolic substance, oleuropein, and its relatives. The olive tree was first cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean around 5,000 years ago, probably as a source of oil. Olive fermentation may have been discovered when early peoples learned to remove the bitterness by soaking the fruit in changes of water. By
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