When Olive Met Tomato : A Complicated Love Story

Oct. 9 is a holiday commemorating the blending of European and American cultures, a topic fit for sorrow and celebration

Greek temple, c. 5th century B.C., and centuries-old olive tree, Agrigento, Sicily, 2015. Author photo. Author’s handsome husband holding an olive.

Here’s one of the top items on my travel wishlist — a day of Sicilian agritourism to pick olives with experts and learn more about the most iconic tree of the Mediterranean.

This wouldn’t be like apple picking in Virginia where you grab your own produce to take home.

It takes time and skill to cure olives into something you want to eat. Olives taken right off the tree are inedible. So a day trip of olive harvesting would be a chance to learn about the process of cultivation that fed and fueled the rise of European civilization.

There’s a reason why the story about the founding of Athens involves an olive tree.

As the tale goes, Athena bested Poseidon to win naming rights to the city. Poseidon made a showy gift of a salt water spring, nice to look at but unusable. Athena offered the people of the city an olive tree, which could provide tasty sustenance as well as fuel and wood for shelter.