The National Geographic Society played host to a tasty lecture at its Grosvenor Auditorium this week, hosting New York’s Fairway Markets guru Steven Jenkins for an olive oil tasting and wine pairing, with wines chosen by Best Cellars sommelier Joshua Wesson. Jenkins began his career in the gourmet food business by collecting an encyclopedic knowledge of cheese, publishing the Cheese Primer in 1994. His most recent book, The Food Life, takes a similar approach to a wide range of ingredients. He took a few minutes this week to explain his olive oil obsession, and to give DCist the rundown on the basics of good olive oil.

You have already made a name for yourself, and for Fairway Markets, through your knowledge of cheeses. How did this lead into a focus on olive oil?

Fairway Markets have always been the name in fine produce, and the biggest part of produce is salad—even more than fruit— and salads have to be dressed with the best sauce that you can possibly muster. It’s always been my feeling that olive oil is the base that I want my family and all my customers to be endeared to, rather than using butter or lard. Olive oil has been a basis for all of the good times that I’ve had in my career and the foodstuffs that are closest to olive oil are where I’ve had my whole career—the Mediterranean basin. The result is, when I had pretty much mastered and conquered cheese by the late ’80s, I really began to concentrate on what I did with olive oil. I made sure that I knew everything about olive and olive oil. I focused on turning myself into an idiot savant, going to every place that knows anything about olives and olive oil.

Nobody in the industry had that knowledge. Everyone was totally ignorant about it, so it made it very easy to take it to the Nth degree. I wanted to make sure that anybody that walks in the store, purchases the very best olive oil for their money, because nine of 10 olive oils are not worth the person buying them. I’ve spent a lot more time deriding and heaping scorn on cheese not worthy of people, now I do the same with olive oil. It’s something that’s sold in virtually every store across the country and that oil is mostly not worthy of the person buying it.

Now I don’t just import the olive oil, I have established relationships with the families, the farmers that produce the olive oil. Now they’ll give the oil to me in barrels, which means several things. First of all, it’s fresher, and second of all, it’s from a specific source; it’s made from olives in a highly specified region that I know. We’re really proud of it.