[leloup_legarou]

If the study was done in the US, then maybe. But it was done in Spain:

> 12,161 individuals, representative of the Spanish population ≥18 years old, were recruited between 2008 and 2010 and followed up through 2019.

Where nobody can prepare food without olive oil. It's the law.

[pessimizer]

> Where nobody can prepare food without olive oil. It's the law.

Like everywhere else, Spain is a place where virgin olive oil is more expensive than the defiled version.

[tluyben2]

Depends where they did this research: outside the big cities (Madrid and Barcelona) and especially in the south, you can find enough places outside supermarkets where you can buy extra virgin cheaper than other oils in supermarket. Especially when you buy per 5 liter from local farmers (which is what I do).

If you live there (or if the research was done there), there would be no point buying oil in the supermarket and you always have the best oil on tap for next to nothing. Hence everyone there uses it for everything.

[leloup_legarou]

That, and also if you've grown up eating EVOO, even not the best quality one you can get from the village etc, you won't tolerate other vegetable and seed oils in your food, and certainly not in your salad.

I had a friend from Canada who returned Home a while ago and he went to the supermarket to buy oil to put on his salad. He saw the price of EVOO and came back with a bottle of sunflower oil, scoffing about the "scam" of EVOO. A couple of weeks later he told me "well, it's really better though isn't it?" and he started buying EVOO after that. I don't know what changed his mind.

Anyway I get it that EVOO sounds like a class marker and I've no doubt it is, in some parts of the world. Another poster was talking about virtue signalling. But in the neck of the woods I'm from (the Mediterranean) it's just not considered posh, or hip, to buy good olive oil, nor do you ever hear anyone bragging about it. It's just how people eat, and they prefer the best quality stuff than the lower quality stuff. Of course, the low quality stuff also sells just because some people can't afford the good quality stuff, and I guess there's also people who are not used to it, even if they're born in one of the places that are famous for it.

There's just a completely different mentality about EVOO (and some other foodstuffs: bread, wine, cheese maybe) in some parts of the Old World. It's about culture and (gulp) identity rather than fashion and those preferences will not change when EVOO (etc) goes out of fashion.