Olives are one of the most important ingredients in Mediterranean cuisine. They’re pressed into the olive oil, used as a garnish, and showcased all on their own as well. This mighty ingredient is packed with flavor and nutritional power, but it didn’t get that way all on its own. Here’s how your olive gets to you from grove to plate.

The Harvest
A quality harvest starts with a quality tree. Olives are grown on olive trees. Olive trees are tropical, and require warm temperatures, dry temperatures, and cool but not cold winters. This means olive trees can’t be grown just anywhere.

Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco and Greece are currently the top producers in olives, in part because their climate is perfect for the Olive tree.
It takes about three years for a new olive tree to bear fruit. Some cultivars can take as long as 12 years though! Once the olive tree is ready to produce, it’s time to harvest.
Even in commercial olive orchards, olive picking is largely done by hand. Harvestors may use some machinery, such as a vibrating tong to shake the olives off the tree, but plenty of handwork is still done.

Curing the Olives
One the olives are picked, they have to be cured before they are ready for the next step in the process. Olives straight off the tree are very bitter. They’re not something you’d really want to eat. One method of doing this is to soak them in a brine. This leeches out the bitter flavor so just the deliciousness of the olive is left behind.
Olive oil is made from fresh olives, and you can still taste that with the note of bitterness in the oil. If olive oil doesn’t have any bitterness, chances are it’s not fresh anymore.

Shipping
Once the olives have been processed, either by pressing them into oil or brining to remove bitterness, they can be bottled, canned or jarred into their final home. Once they are preserved, they are ready to be shipped around the world to the restaurant or grocery store.
Olives often need to travel quite far to get to places that don’t have olive trees, but luckily preparations such as canning, jarring and being made into oil allow olives to be shipped easily.

Olive Appreciation
It takes a lot of work to prepare olives. Waiting for the tree to grow, handpicking the resulting olives, pressing them into olive oil. Without the help of people who grow these olives, we could never appreciate them elsewhere in the world.
Luckily, olive growers are passionate about their work, and about the delicious fruit of the olive tree. Thanks to their hardwork, we can enjoy olives all over the world.
The next time you bite into an olive cured in oil, or enjoy a dip made with an olive oil base, think about the olive tree it came from. Your delicious meal started out on a tree, growing in the gentle breeze of a Mediterranean field, and had a long journey to get to your plate.

The Mediterranean is a diverse region filled with people with a passion for food. Over the course of thousands of years, they have crafted unique and flavorful foods that are both healthy and delicious. There’s more to Mediterranean cuisine than just the food though.

Mediterranean cuisine also centers around a series of customs that are associated with their food. It’s not just eating, it’s a way of eating—and studies show the way people in the Mediterranean eat may have an impact on how long they live. In this article we will take a look at three of those additional habits.

They Eat Together
Mediterranean food isn’t meant to be eaten alone. Eating together is a big part of the culture, and studies show that it may have benefits beyond the nutrition of the food. Teenagers that regularly eat meals with their parents have better overall eating habits.

People who eat together also feel less lonely, and often have fewer incidents of depression. That means eating together makes you feel better.
There’s something about sitting down with family to catch up, talk about your problems, or laugh over a shared joke. Only about 30% of people share at least one meal a day with their family. By bringing this number up we can make the world a happier, healthier place.

If You Do Have To Eat Alone, Do It Right
When you’re home alone, what do you eat? Most likely, it’s pretty boring. You might scrape together some cheese and crackers or microwave a TV dinner. Why go to all the trouble to prepare a meal if you’re the only one who is going to eat it?

The healthiest food is fresh though, and Mediterranean people know this. When they eat by themselves, it’s often just as rich and healthy as if they were cooking for the whole family.

Although it might seem like a waste of time to put out the good China just for yourself, it’s worth doing. Valuing yourself is a critical step in making sure you eat right every day—and also that you feel worthy.

Take Time to Live
Americans have a very fast paced culture, and work is a big part of that. In the Mediterranean, this way of living is reversed. Mediterranean people work to live, not the other way around. This can have a huge, positive impact on health if Americans choose to adopt this too.

When work is over, let it be over. Relax and enjoy your food, enjoy an evening out, enjoy a great sunset. Life is worth living, and Mediterranean people make sure everything from their meals to their weekends are relaxing and enjoyable.

The Mediterranean developed so many great dishes because of how passionate the people there are about food. It’s possible to adopt this way of living wherever you are, by taking time to slow down, relax, and enjoy your life.

Mediterranean food is beautiful not just because of the flavors, because of the care and passion that went into that meal from farm to table.

There are few Mediterranean dishes as impressive as shawarma. Shawarma is made by stacking meat and fat alternately on a vertical rotisserie, often very high. The meat is cooked slowly this way, and then thin shavings are sliced off for customers to enjoy.

This traditional food has been enjoyed as far back as the 18th century Ottoman empire. Early shawarma was cooked over an open fire, but today a machine is used as well as an even heating source for food safety.

What hasn’t changed at all are the spices used to make shawarma what it is. Most shawarma is made with coriander, turmeric and ginger as well as many other spices. The mix of spices is iconic and encompasses a classic taste of Mediterranean food.

Meats Available
Although some people think that shawarma originally came from the way shepherds hung lambs over a fire to roast it, lamb is not the only meat that can be used to make shawarma. Shawarma can be lamb, chicken, beef, goat or turkey.

These meats can even be mixed together on the spit to make new and unique combinations. What sort of meat is used will vary depending on where you visit, but they are all cooked the same way with the same rich seasonings.

Why Shawarma is so Good
You may have noticed that shawarma tastes different than meat cooked in other ways—even without the spices. Way back in the Ottoman Empire, chefs realized that much of the flavor of meat was lost when turned on a spit horizontally, because the fat fell into the fire below.

They came up with the idea of the vertical spit. Instead of the fat falling below, gravity causes any melted fat to circulate through the meat instead, dripping downwards through the whole pile.

This keeps the flavor of the fat in the meat itself, without losing it from the positioning of the meat. The result is a particularly delicious cut of meat.

The meat is further improved on by the way it is cut. Trimming small shavings off the side gives shawarma a fine texture, and also enables it to be prepared very fast. Shawarma is considered a street food because it can quickly be prepared for hungry customers.

Just a quick shave off the spit and shawarma can be made into a wrap or sandwich right away. The success of this cooking method is the reason why it has been so popular for centuries.

The next time you take a bite of shawarma, take a moment to appreciate the ancient chefs who came up with this idea. Their hard work to invent a vertical spit and create this amazing food item is the reason we have it today.

Since this time period shawarma has globalized, and countries all over the world have put their own unique spin on what it should taste like. Although the flavor or meat may change depending on where you come from, the vertical spit and the method of cooking remain the same.