Are Olives A Fruit?

Yes. Olives are fruit. Drupes specifically, in the same family as cherries, plums, and peaches. And no — they are not a vegetable, even though every grocery store and cheese board treats them like one.

Is an olive a fruit or a vegetable?

An olive is a fruit. Botanically, a fruit is the part of a plant that develops from the flower and holds the seed — and that's exactly what an olive is: fleshy outer layer, hard pit, seed inside the pit. A vegetable, by contrast, is any other edible part of a plant: leaves (spinach), stems (celery), roots (carrots), bulbs (onions). Olives grow from the olive tree's blossoms and carry the tree's seed, so they were never in the vegetable category to begin with.

The confusion is entirely about flavor and placement. Olives are salty, savory, and sit next to cheese and charcuterie — so our brains file them with pickles and capers, not with peaches. But "tastes savory" isn't a botanical category. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and avocados are all fruits for the same reason olives are. The olive is just the one that went furthest undercover.

We get this question constantly at trade shows. People walk up to the table, look at the bottles, and the first thing out of their mouth is something like "is olive oil a seed oil?" The answer is no — and the reason is what we're going to talk about here. Olive oil is a fruit juice. The olive isn't a seed. It's a fruit. Once you know that, a lot of other things about olive oil start to make sense.

The botany — a fruit hiding in plain sight

A drupe is a fruit with a fleshy outer layer and a hard pit at the center. The pit holds the actual seed inside. The flesh is the part you eat.

Cherries are drupes. So are plums, peaches, mangoes, dates, and coconuts. Coffee beans come from drupes — the bean you grind into your morning cup is technically the seed inside the pit of a coffee fruit. Pistachios and almonds belong to the same family. The part of an almond you eat is the seed inside a drupe.

Olives fit right into that crowd. Outer flesh, hard pit, tiny seed inside the pit. Olea europaea, the olive tree, sits in the Oleaceae family alongside jasmine and lilac. Lilac is a relative of the olive. Almonds are first cousins. The botanical world doesn't care that we eat olives the way we eat cheese.

Why we don't think of them as fruit

A few reasons we don't classify olives the way the botanists do.

The first one is the flavor. The fruit category most Americans know best — apples, oranges, berries, watermelon, grapes — leans sweet. Olives don't. They're bitter on the tree and salty after we cure them. Your brain pattern-matches on flavor, and olives never fit the pattern.

The second reason is that we don't eat them raw. A raw olive off the tree is inedible. The bitterness is so intense your face will move in directions you didn't know it could. The compound responsible is oleuropein, and it protects the fruit from animals and pests until the seed is ready. We never meet the olive in its natural fruit-like state. We only encounter it after it's been transformed.

There's also the company it keeps. Olives show up on cheese boards, in salads, on pizza, in martinis, next to anchovies and capers. The brain takes its cues from the neighbors at the plate. And olives are always with the savory crowd.

What kind of fruit is it, nutritionally?

An unusual one. Most fruit stores its energy as sugar; the olive stores it as fat — the same monounsaturated fat that makes olive oil the engine of the Mediterranean diet. Ten olives run roughly 40–60 calories, almost no sugar, a little fiber, and a real dose of vitamin E, iron, and polyphenols — the antioxidant compounds that give fresh olive oil its peppery bite. Cured table olives do carry sodium from the brine, which is worth knowing if you're watching salt. But as fruits go, the olive is closer to the avocado than the apple: a fatty fruit, and that's precisely what makes it pressable into oil.

At the grove — what fruit actually looks like

We farm 200 acres of wild, mountainous land in Milas, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Tens of thousands of naturally occurring olive trees, some of them centuries old. We don't plant new ones. We work with what's already there. Every single tree gets pruned every single year, by hand, by people who know what they're doing.

During harvest you can watch the fruit do its thing. An olive starts green. Tight, firm, faintly bitter. Over the course of weeks it darkens. Green to a dusty purple. Then to a deeper red-violet. Then to black. The flesh softens. The oil content rises. The flavor compounds shift.

That's a fruit ripening. The same arc as a peach going from hard to fragrant, or a cherry going from pale to dark red. It just happens slower, and we don't usually witness it, because by the time olives reach most people, they're already cured and in a jar.

Different points in that ripening arc make different oils. Our Early Harvest comes from olives picked when they're still mostly green. High in polyphenols. Peppery. Grassy. More intense. We hold off on Mature Harvest by a few weeks and pick when the fruit has started to darken. Smoother. Less bitter. Higher yield. We can choose the moment because we're standing in front of the trees when it happens.

This is the part most premium olive oil brands can't actually offer. Brightland, Graza, and most of the other names you see on Instagram don't farm. They contract with local producers and co-packers — people in olive-producing countries who press the oil and ship it. That model can produce a fine product, but it's not the same as standing in your own grove making the call about when to start the harvest. We can taste the fruit on the tree the day we pick it. The mill is 20 minutes from the trees. The oil is in the bottle within hours.

Why you can't eat them raw

Worth dwelling on, because most people don't know how strange this fruit actually is.

A fresh olive off the tree is inedible. Try it once and you'll never forget. The astringency is so strong it dries out your tongue immediately. Oleuropein, the bitter compound, is the olive tree's defense mechanism. It keeps animals from eating the fruit before the seeds are mature enough to germinate.

To make olives edible, the oleuropein has to go. Different cultures do it differently.

Brine curing is the most common. Olives soak in salt water for weeks or months. Slow, traditional, what most Mediterranean families have done at home for centuries.

Water curing pulls the bitterness out gradually through repeated soaks in fresh water. Common for green olives.

Lye curing is faster but harsher. Most American supermarket black olives are lye-cured, which is why they taste like almost nothing.

Dry curing means packing olives in salt. The result is the wrinkled, intense black olives you find sold loose at Middle Eastern markets.

The version of the olive most of us know — salty, soft, full of flavor — only exists because of one of these processes. The fruit as the tree makes it isn't a fruit you'd actually want to eat.

Green olives and black olives are the same fruit

One more thing that surprises people: green and black olives aren't different varieties. They're the same fruit at different points in the ripening arc. Green olives are picked early, firm and grassy; black olives are picked late, soft and mellow — exactly the same logic as our Early Harvest and Mature Harvest oils. (The uniformly jet-black canned ones are a special case: picked green, then turned black by oxidation during lye curing.)

The Turkish breakfast table

In Turkish kitchens, olives have a bigger place than they have in most American ones. Breakfast is the example.

A Turkish breakfast — kahvaltı — is a spread, not a plate. Bread. Cheese. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Eggs. Jam. Honey. Butter. And almost always a bowl of olives. Green olives, black olives, sometimes both. Salt-cured, oil-cured, sometimes herbed.

You eat them with everything. Pair an olive with a bite of feta. Tear bread, drag it through the oil left on the olive plate. Slip an olive into your mouth between sips of strong tea. The olive isn't a centerpiece. It's the bass line running underneath everything else on the table.

That's the closer-to-the-source way of being with olives. They live in the savory part of the day. You don't think of them as fruit. But botanically, they are. Both things are true at the same time.

Botanically yes, practically no

If you've made it this far, here's the answer in plain language.

Botanically, olives are fruit. Drupes from the Oleaceae family, kin to cherries, peaches, and lilac. They are not vegetables — no part of the definition fits.

Culturally and at the table, they're a salt-cured, savory ingredient. The fruit you don't think of as fruit. The one your great-grandmother probably ate with breakfast and your grandmother taught you to put in a martini.

And since this question almost always leads to the next one — yes, olive oil is technically a fruit juice. The olive is a fruit. Olive oil is what you get when you press that fruit. The olive just happens to be fatty enough that the juice is mostly oil. Orange juice for oranges. Apple juice for apples. Olive oil for olives.

It's one of the oldest food traditions humans have. Six thousand years of working with the same plant. And it all starts with a fruit you can't actually eat off the tree.

FAQ

Is an olive a fruit or a vegetable?

A fruit. It develops from the olive tree's flower and contains the seed — the botanical definition of a fruit. It's never been a vegetable; it just eats like one.

What kind of fruit is an olive?

A drupe (stone fruit): fleshy outside, hard pit, seed inside the pit. Same category as cherries, peaches, plums, dates, and mangoes.

Are olives berries?

No. Berries carry their seeds in the flesh (grapes, blueberries, tomatoes). Olives keep their seed inside a stone, which makes them drupes.

Why are olives classified as fruit if they aren't sweet?

Botany classifies by structure, not taste. Olives store energy as fat instead of sugar — which is why they're savory, and why you can press them into oil.

Are green olives and black olives different fruits?

Same fruit, different ripeness. Green = picked early, black = picked ripe. (Canned jet-black olives are green olives darkened during lye curing.)

Is olive oil a fruit juice?

Technically, yes. Olive oil is the pressed juice of the olive fruit — which is also why it's not a seed oil.

Are olives good for you?

Yes, in the way the Mediterranean diet suggests: monounsaturated fat, vitamin E, iron, and polyphenols, with almost no sugar. Cured olives do add sodium from the brine.

Keep reading

• Is Olive Oil a Seed Oil? No — It's a Fruit Juice
• Olive Oil Polyphenols: What They Are and What They Do
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil vs Olive Oil: What's Really in Your Bottle
• Bean Salad with Castelvetrano Olives and Fresh Herbs
• Citrus Chicken with Warm Olives, Roasted the Turkish Way
• Gavurdağı Salad (Turkish Tomato and Walnut Salad)

— Berk Bahceci