“At the very beginning of his book about olive oil, Tom Mueller takes us to an archaeological site in Cyprus where, about 4,000 years prior, a disaster had struck. The catastrophe—likely an earthquake—an ancient manufacturing complex, a sort of early high-tech incubator with operations in ore smelting, textile production, and perfume creation, all circled around mills and huge containers for processing olives into olive oil.  Mueller describes how archaeologists gradually realized the olive oil fueled the other manufactures: it provided the raw material for the perfume, the industrial lubricant for the looms, and the fuel for the smelting…”