Pretty Darn Local

My super-awesome friend Sarah, a fellow Pasadena blogger, did much of the organizing (read people herding), some of the picking (read blackened fingers), and all of the websiting (read this) for Caltech's First Annual Olive Harvest. I had to work today--sometimes having a job, as we all know, gets in the way of having a life--so I couldn't volunteer, but I stopped by this afternoon after work to get an idea of how a prestigious science school harvests olives. Here's what I gleaned: they harvest olives like scientists would. Imagine that!

After volunteers harvested the olives this morning, they sent of the majority of the fruit to Santa Barbara to be milled and pressed; the happy workers milled what remained with this specially-designed contraption:

After milling, volunteers pressed them in another Caltech-designed machine, then sent the collected fluid off to the Bio lab to hit the centrifuges for quick separation, allowing them to taste the oil the same day they harvested olives.

To highlight the availibility of other local foods, organizers had set up tables of yummy local samplings and posted maps of the campus's "grazing spots," many of which hosted some remarkably delicious-smelling mints and geraniums.





Volunteers--hundreds of them--worked hard, but they celebrated their accomplishment at the end of the day in a grand, olive-themed feast.


The very local Caltech olive oil hits the bookstore in a few weeks. I'm counting the days to taste the product, and I've decided that next year, no matter what, I'm volunteering: it looks like far too much fun to miss out on a second time.