Michael T. Roberts

speaker

180 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Apr

Michael T. Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 670. Beeconomics 101 · 10 Apr 2026 podcast

But it's actually real olive oil.

My students have never passed the olive oil test in class.

So in class, we'll have three different olive oils.

It used to be that I would call the Mondovi Center up at UC Davis, which specializes in olive oil and wine, and I would ask them, what's the worst olive oil on the market?

And they said, well, whatever you buy in the grocery store.

So I would go to the store, and I knew a couple brands that were pretty poor, and I would pick those, and I'd bring one of them back to the class.

And then I'd have like a medium, an olive oil that was sometimes fraudulent, but not so bad.

I'm going to have a really premium olive oil.

Oftentimes, I would bring it back from Italy myself, and I knew what they were doing, and it was great olive oil.

Or I would get it at a specialty store that started to pop up in L.A.

in recent years.

So those three choices, and the students invariably would vote for the olive oil that was what we call pumice.

It's adulterated olive oil as the favorite olive oil because they were accustomed to the taste.

And that will lead to the conversation, OK, it's not a safety problem.

It's a fraud problem.

But do you care?

You like the taste.

Do you care if it's not authentic?

Standard of identity in one word, it's a recipe.

It helps identify what a product is.

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