Use of olive oil, even in cooking, has become a sort of fashion among the elites in this country of mustard oil users. An eye-opening article appeared a few months ago in the prestigious “New Yorker” magazines. It says:

Unscrupulous olive-oil producers from Italy often mix the olive-oil with Turkish hazelnut oil and Argentinean sunflower-seed oil, all identified as Greek olive oil. In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union.

fraud remains a major international problem: olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.)

The olive is a drupe, or stone fruit, like a plum or a cherry. Most vegetable oils are extracted in a refinery from seeds or nuts, using solvents, heat, and intense pressure; the best olive oils are made using a simple hydraulic press or centrifuge—they are more like fresh-squeezed fruit juices than like industrial fats. The olives are harvested at the moment of the invaiatura, when they begin to turn from green to black; ideally they are picked by hand and milled within hours, to minimize oxidation and enzymatic reactions, which leave unpleasant tastes and odors in the oil. There are approximately seven hundred olive varieties, or cultivars, whose distinctive tastes and aromas are evident in oils that are made properly, just as different grape varietals are expressed in fine wines.
In the past decade, olive-oil consumption has risen thirty-five per cent in southern Europe, its traditional market, and more than a hundred per cent in North America. Much of the growth is due to the increasing prestige of the highest-quality olive oil, extra-virgin. (The European Union also recognizes several inferior grades, including virgin and lampante, or “lamp oil,” which is made from olives that have spoiled and fallen from trees, and cannot legally be sold as food.) In Italy, where most olive oil is labelled “extra-virgin,” competitions, public tastings, and “oil bars” have proliferated.
According to European Union, extra-virgin oil must be made exclusively by physical means (by a press or a centrifuge) and meet thirty-two chemical requirements, including having “free acidity” of no more than 0.8 per cent. (In olive oil, free acidity is an indicator of decomposition.) Virgin oil, the next grade lower, must have free acidity of no more than two per cent. Oil that has a greater percentage of free acidity is classified as lampante.
Nnety per cent of oil sold in Italy as extra-virgin isn’t of premium grade. It’s anything but extra-virgin. The extraordinary stuff sells at forty or fifty euros a kilo, which a few in the world can afford.
Olive-oil fraud was also common in antiquity. Unscrupulous oil merchants who used to mix high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provided a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, fuel for lamps and furnaces, a base for perfumes, and a cure for heart ailments, stomach aches, hair loss, and excessive perspiration. They also considered it a sacred substance; cult statues, like the effigy of Zeus at Olympia, were rubbed regularly with oil. People who bathed or exercised in Greek gymnasiums anointed their bodies as well, using oils that were scented with pressed flowers and roots.

For more details click: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mueller

It simply a healthy edible oil it can be used in the same way as other edible oils like Groundnut, Sunflower, Cottonseed etc.
More over it has beneficial effects on heart health.

I love drinkin olive oil raw.. It tastes good. Also, Olive oil drenched salads taste so good. Olives are quite tasty themselves.. I like them when they are green.. Black ones arent too bad either.. long live olives

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