I guess this is more for the middle classes, anyway in a recent "report" on Italian telivisions RAI 3 it was revealed that most of the olive oil labeled "Tuscan Extra Vergin"
is in fact " rectified lamp oil" the real tuscan olive oil costs about thirty quid a half litre bottle and is enjoyed by an elite few, errr me included .. but not at that price.
Every supermarket in northern europe has shelves rammed with the stuff .. people can't get enough of it ..

i dont know which is worse, the orginal garble, or this dubious stuff about lamp oil ! can it be true ? Oddly enough, i tried burning some supermarket olive oil in a a lamp last year, and it didnt work. besides, it smells like olive, so please explain further if you can...

If you want it it Italian there is tons of stuff about this.
evidently the law tyhe Italian law states that by adding a few drops of extra virgin olive oil to any old shit, the manufacture can lable his product extra virgin oil.

 http://italianfood.about.com/library/snip/blsip109.htm
Snippets from the Italian Scene
Olive Oil Fraud: Unexpected Effects of Another
Provision



I'm not with Italian Prime Minister Mr. Berlusconi on another provision he has enacted, which requires that all foreign documents presented in Italian courts receive a seal of authenticity from a government office in the country of origin. The stated goal of the law is to provide Italian defendants with a guarantee that the prosecution won't trot out false documents, for example doctored bank records from a Swiss bank in a corruption trial, and indeed its practical effect is to make following the money in cases of corruption and bribery much more difficult. The provision is having a pernicious effect in food,
too, however, because food fraud generally involves falsifying documents, and if the fraud takes place across international borders, the new law says that the fraudulent documents from abroad must have the seal of authenticity from the government of origin, which will obviously be difficult to get.

For example, a news analysis program called Report that's transmitted by RAI 3, one of the
State-owned networks, discussed a case in which a boatload of olio di sansa, the oil that's extracted
through heat and chemical processing of the olive pulp after the extravirgin oil has been pressed out,
spent a few days in a Turkish port and returned with papers certifying that it was Extravirgin olive oil.
A clear case of fraud, but the foreign documents in the paper trail didn't have the seal of authenticity
required by the new Italian law and the judge who tried the case was forced to set the perpetrators
free. This is not how things are supposed to work.

Nor was the remainder of the program more reassuring; it turns out that almost all of the Virgin and
Extravirgin olive oil produced by large commercial Italian olive oil plants owes its certification to slight
of hand of one sort or another. Much is olio lampante, which is made from olives that have fallen from
the trees, are collected with huge vacuum cleaners, and pressed, at which point the resulting oil is
reprocessed to make it palatable. It shouldn't be extravirgin, but that's what it's sold as. There's much
more too; for a transcript of the program, see  http://www.report.rai.it/2liv.asp?s=93 (a long page in
Italian). How to keep from being snookered? As I've said before, buy olive oil that's estate pressed
and bottled, and remember that you get what you pay for. Good olive oil comes from olives that are
handpicked before they're ripe, and the labor involved is expensive. So cheap extravirgin Italian oil
probably isn't. For more information on olive oil and purchasing tips, see Andar per Olio.