The olive oil you buy is more Tunisian than you think.

Tunisia is one of the largest olive oil producers on earth. Some harvests, the largest exporter outside Europe. My grandmother’s grove is a small piece of that.

Here is the part most people don’t know. Most Tunisian oil leaves the country in bulk. Tankers, not bottles. It gets bottled somewhere else, blended, and sold under someone else’s name. Look for the small print on a supermarket bottle — “blend of EU and non-EU olive oils.” That line is doing a lot of work.

None of this is illegal. It is just quiet. The country that grew the fruit disappears somewhere between the press and the shelf.

So when people ask me whether Tunisian olive oil is any good, I try not to laugh. There is a fair chance they have been eating it for years. They just never saw the name.

I grew up on this oil. My grandmother — Meema — bought the farm herself, two hours south of Tunis. The family still eats its harvest all year. As a junior I was ranked 69 in the world and played the Australian Open. I have eaten a lot of things sold to athletes since. I keep coming back to what she put on the table.

Meema exists to do one simple thing the bulk trade cannot. Press the oil in Tunisia. Bottle it in Tunisia. Put the grove on the label and the lab sheet on the site. Sell it as what it is.

We are not asking you to believe Tunisia is as good as anywhere else. We are telling you that you already know. You have been drinking it.

— Slim