We seem to have seen an inordinate number of olive trees the last few weeks. Albania was covered in them and after travelling around Morocco, I would think that olives are one of the main crops here. These two countries are small stuff compared to Italy or Spain where the olive production is much greater.
Most of us think of olives as something that comes in a jar or maybe on pizza. Except for Mediterranean countries, olives are not consumed in great quantities.
On our drive today I started thinking. With all of these trees how many olives would each human have to consume to make sure all that grew were eaten.
So I check into a few estimates. How many people are in the world right now, answer about 8 billion. Then, how many olive trees are producing, answer about 1 billion. Last question and this one is a toughie, how many olives does one tree produce in a year? This one depends on so many things, like weather, the location of the plantation, the variety of olives and the fact that the trees have off and on years. The last variable is, farmers don’t count olives, they quantify by weight. This all means a tree produces 15 to 25 kgs of olives per year, there are about 250 olives per kg. So the range is large, 3750 to 12500 olives per year produced by each tree.
I will use a mid point on the olives per year, say 8000. With 8 billion people and 1 billion trees means the olives from one tree will be divided between 8 people. If that tree produces 8000 olives each person has to eat 1000 olives per year. Sounds like a lot but really it is only 2.7 olives per day. Quite plausible especially for people from the Mediterranean region. For the rest of us it seems like a bit much but this calculation does not take into account olive oil production. A person may consume hundreds of olives per year while cooking.
What all this means is I don’t have to eat olives and the world production will still be used up. I don’t like olives.