Celebrated in myth and legend since antiquity, the olive and its oil has now entered Caltech lore with the completion of the Institute’s first olive harvest festival on November 2. Caltech community members turned out in force to collect a ripe campus crop from some 80 olive trees, using a combination of 16-foot ladders, cherry pickers, rakes, and more than a little manual labor. Festival organizers estimate that the event yielded about a ton of olives, which should work out to as many as 1,200 bottles of “Caltech’s Own” olive oil. While enthusiastic volunteers promptly ran a portion of the harvest through student-designed milling and pressing equipment on campus, the bulk of the day’s bounty was trucked up the coast to be pressed, purified, and bottled by the Santa Barbara Olive Company. The finished product will be sold through the Caltech Bookstore, and proceeds will be used to support scholarships, student activities, and staff bonuses.

The day also featured culinary tastings that relied heavily on the olive, cooking and ice-sculpture demonstrations, a tour of “the edible campus,” and to top it all off, a fine evening feast. Some 2,000 students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends congregated at long tables set up along the Olive Walk for a Mediterranean-style dinner, whose more “nouvelle” offerings included citrus olive oil cake (pronounced “really good” by most diners) and olive oil sorbet (on which the jury still appears to be out).

Many participants sported the event’s signature T-shirt featuring a design by Caltech computer scientist Santiago Lombeyda, whose entry was chosen out of the dozens submitted in the weeks leading up to the olive harvest. Senior Kate Craig created the winning artwork for the olive oil bottle label; all the contest entries, along with the complete Caltech olive annals, news coverage, updates, and more, can be found here.

Across the campus and into the trees: Clockwise from top, Caltech arborist and groundskeeper Gonzalo Escobedo Nunez monitors president Jean-Lou Chameau’s early-morning ascent into the tree tops for some prime olive picking on November 2. More olive harvesters, many of them decked out in the festival’s official green T-shirt, converge on the olive trees lining Beckman Mall to support or clamber up ladders, collecting the black, green, and red fruit, piles of which can be seen against the backdrop of Beckman Auditorium. Before they can be pressed into oil, some of the newly plucked olives are crushed into a paste under the wheels of a mill designed and partly built by Caltech students. Among those looking on is Dvin Adalian (in the orange T-shirt), whose casual olive oil experiment last fall with fellow student Ricky Jones got the whole thing rolling. Later in the day, much of the campus community enjoys an olive-themed feast along Caltech’s Olive Walk, and a very small olive picker raises a really tall rake to the day’s success.