A bag of hand-picked olives sits in a grove in the Apokoronas region of Crete. A winter crop, the olives will be transported this same day to a local olive processing facility, one of hundreds of small, mostly family-owned olive oil presses scattered across the island. On Crete, cultivation of the olive begun around 3500 B.C. and contributed significantly to the growth of the Minoan civilization. Today the overwhelming majority of olive trees in the world are in Mediterranean countries…