NEW YORK – Guido da Vinci had always wondered how there could so much extra virgin olive oil in supermarkets across the world.
“I mean wherever I went in the world, I could find extra virgin olive oil. A lot of it. Finally, I thought: how could this be?”
“So I did some research on the internet. And I found that more than two-thirds of olive oil that is labeled as extra virgin isn’t really extra virgin. Some of it may be virgin, but lots of it isn’t virgin at all!”
“And some of it isn’t even olive oil! They mix in soy oil or corn oil, most of it genetically modified!”
Da Vinci lost his plum job as senior food critic at Manhattan Gourmand after he went public with his olive oil conspiracies.
He is also starting a class action suit against the olive oil industry for fraudulent labeling. His “Olive Oil Truth” account on Twitter (@OliveOilTruther) already has more than 20,000 followers.
But not everyone believes in such wild theories.
Vito Corleone IV is a spokesman for the olive oil industry, and a prominent olive oil conspiracy debunker.
“Da Vinci is just some crazy olive oil Truther. He did internet research? Really?”
“There’s no way a conspiracy of this magnitude could ever happen. Do you know how many people it would take to pull this off? Hundreds, maybe thousands. A whistle-blower would have come forward, for sure.”
“People have tried to come forward,” says da Vinci. “There have already been class action suits for fraud against the olive oil distributors, including Corleone.”
Key witnesses to the olive oil class action suits have died in mysterious multi-gunshot suicides, and another witness was garroted in a cannoli truck, all shortly before they were scheduled to testify.
“It all makes me think twice before filing my class action suit against the Corleones and Abbandandos,” admitted da Vinci. “But food is my life.”
Corleone claims da Vinci is just a conspiracy theorist: “Next he will say that the Virgin Mary wasn’t extra virgin! Or that we never went to the moon!”
However, Guido da Vinci asserts that he is a normal man, who believes that most conspiracy theories are totally ridiculous.
“Corleone says I’m a moon landing denier, but I’m not! I mean, why would NASA fake the moon landings? How hard could it be to travel 235,000 miles through space, and land gently on the moon carrying three men? Men who survived temperature changes of 400 degrees Fahrenheit in their special spacesuits, took the most amazing photographs in history, launched the lunar module from the moon without a ground crew, docked with the command module in lunar orbit, and flew 235,000 miles back through heavy space radiation on a big tank of gas with mostly untested equipment?
“And televised it all back to earth on Christmas Eve to a global audience? 1969 was just an amazing time in space technology. There’s nothing to see on the moon anyway, so the international space station just stays in earth’s orbit now. NASA would never lie to us. Please.”
Corleone says that “All this detailed information just shows that Da Vinci is a moon landing denier, just as he is an extra virgin olive oil denier.”
Da Vinci disagrees: “I just really love olive oil. And I demand quality and truth in food labeling. And it breaks my heart that olive oil companies would conspire to sell anything less than a premium product to the American people. If America’s elite could lie about olive oil, they could lie about anything.”
Corleone said: “I believe in America. If da Vinci wants to believe in crazy extra virgin olive oil conspiracy theories, I guess that is his right as an Italian-American.”
However, FBI spokesman Muddy Waters wasn’t so sure. “A person who denies the purity of olive oil, especially if he or she is also anti-GMO foods…it could be a sign that the individual is a potential domestic terrorist.”