Olives! Olives, grown for food and oil, are one of the most ancient crops in human history. The groves of olives in some of these photos are hundreds of years old, clinging to hot, dusty hillsides in some of the more contentious areas of the world, and still putting out a harvest year after year. Here are a few images of olive harvest from all over the world.
• Top: Olive harvest in Israel. Image by Flickr member ilan sharif.
• Olive harvest in Greece. They are spreading nets under the trees. Image by Flickr member RobW.
• A net to catch olives. Image by Flickr member reinvented.
• Machines in Cinque Terre, a region of coastal villages in northern Italy. They are designed to transport the olive harvest from the groves. Image by Flickr member Scott MacLeod Liddle.
• Harvesting olives in Qusin village, Palestine, near the border. Image by Flickr member michaelramallah.
• Sifting the olive harvest in Palestine. Image by Flickr member michaelramallah.
• Harvesting olives in Matzuva, Israel. Image by Flickr member maxnathans.
• The oil from the Matzuva harvest. Image by Flickr member maxnathans .
• Harvesting olives on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California. See more info on their 2007 harvest here. Image by Flickr member jilldoughtie.
Previous Harvest galleries:
• Harvest Time: Picking Tea in Kenya, Japan, and India
• Harvest Time: Soybeans from Maryland to Wisconsin
(All images licensed for use under Creative Commons.)
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
One must have a heart of stone not to love olives (which themselves have a heart of stone, ironically enough). These are beautiful images, and I thank you for posting them. But people of conscience should remember that the harvest season in Palestine, this year more than ever before, is dominated by images more heartbreaking than heartwarming. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian olive groves - and on the farmers tending them - are at record high: in southern Nablus alone, settlers have already burned 3000 trees this year. This on top of the perennial bulldozing of Palestinian olive groves by the IDF. Some of these trees were thousands of years old, dating from the Roman period. Not everyone loves olives, it seems.
The gentle olive, whose branch is the very symbol of peace, must also bring feelings of sorrow just now. I don't mean to rain on the truly lovely olive parade you've documented here, but right now, the urgent, major news story about olives is a very sad one, and I think it ought to be included among these happier images. Perhaps you might add the iconic photograph of the elderly Palestinian woman, weeping as she clings to her newly amputated tree, with an IDF bulldozer lurking in the background to finish the job.
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Must even a cooking website become a forum for disinformation and propaganda? I would suggest that there are other forums for political rants.
I am indeed sadden for your imagined elderly Palestinian woman who lost her olive tree. I am sadder still for the actual families of the victims of Hamas suicide bombers -- and the family of kidnapped Gilad Shalit.
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Dear vbp,
I am not convinced that "even a cooking website" need neglect the broader social issues in which "even cooking" has its context. In fact, this "cooking website" has admirably attended to such issues in many ways, as a cursory browse through the archive will show: local produce, community gardens, fair trade, and so on. Other "cooking websites" have addressed exactly this issue.
One thing I like about The Kitchn is that it rejects the assumption that a passion for cuisine is incompatible with responsible attention to the real social contexts which allow delicacies to be delivered to our mouths. The Kitchn has consistently reminded us to consider the details of these processes.
This post was about olives. My response comment was about olives. Olives have a context, and part of that context has been internationally newsworthy at the present moment. I am not sure I understand your introduction of Hamas, suicide bombings, or Gilad Shalit to the topic of olives.
But, to address your change of topic: Anyone without a heart of stone (anyone but an olive?) must sympathize with victims of bombings, whether by Hamas suicide bombers or by Israeli bombardments. Why can we not also be saddened by the settlers' and the IDF's destruction of olive trees (and olive farmers)? Unless you believe such destruction is justified...
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I do believe that such destruction is justified when Palestinians chose to allow their olive groves to be the base of terrorist operations. I attach for your information just one of many links, easily google-able, reporting that an olive grove was bulldozed because it was being used by snipers. In this instance, the IDF acted because a women and two girls died as a result the terrorists bullets. In other cases, the groves are dug up because they are used as a place to hide weapons. I do not believe that olive groves are destroyed without basis, and you are naive and/or uninformed to assume otherwise.
Indeed, the IDF actually protects Palestinian groves from certain radical settlers who might wish to case harm. Another link is attached in support of this point.
I hope that one day there will not be violence in Israel or any where in the world. But until that day arrives, I will not mourn the loss of an olive tree if it means that one less person will be the victim of terrorism.
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000689.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030476.html
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