The Obtuse Oleato

Moments ago, I finished a Starbucks Oleato Oat Latte. Oleato beverages have just become available across Canada, where I reside. Here is the boilerplate, corporate propaganda explaining the nature and origin of this beverage:

I do not recommend that you squander your precious resources on this vile concoction, the very existence of which is evidence of the power of impulsive, megalomaniacal corporate moguls to make manifest dreadful ideas and distribute the wretched results on a planetary scale.

Permit me to explain that I am a zealous admirer and avid consumer of caffeinated beverages, and I am especially fond of coffee in virtually any form, from a flat white to a Vietnamese iced coffee. The latter is both delicious and satisfying over ice on a hot, humid afternoon after one has graded a glacial drumlin of mediocre, undergraduate prose. Take it from me.

Moreover, as a bachelor who does a great deal of cooking for his own consumption, I have come to rely upon olive oil routinely, as my own amateurish research concerning both the preparation of various foodstuffs, and the effects upon the body of ingesting them, has moved me to spurn other fats and oils in favor of this Mediterranean staple.

Thus, I would seem to fit the profile of a potential advocate of the Oleato. Alas, I am nothing of the kind.

The first sip of this beverage conjured a vivid tableaux in my peculiar imagination: an anthropomorphized olive screaming in agony as it suffered torturous boiling in a vat of brown, nerve-jangling joe. As anyone whose doting Nona has scolded him or her or them NOT to add a dollop of olive oil to a bubbling pot of pasta water knows, that oil forms a worthless slick atop the water. Once the pasta has been bathed therein, it coats the noodles and causes any sauce, cheese, spices or herbs with which they are anointed promptly to slide off and form a sad sludge on one’s plate. Nonas know.

Olive oil is a wonderful substance, a veritable gift to our benighted species from the divine denizens of Mount Olympus. Relish it. Writhe ecstatically in pools of it if you wish, singing the praises of Dionysus or Hera as you do so. Keep it away from your coffee. It will form a nauseous slick on top of it and little else.

This hideous hybrid is the result of a commonplace and dangerous logical fallacy, known as the appeal to authority. A brief and lucid explanation of this fallacy can be found here:

It ought carefully to be explained that not all appeals to authority are fallacious or illegitimate. If I have a question about astronomy, I will consult the work, i.e., the ideas and arguments and explanations, of a distinguished expert in that field, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If I want to understand the nature and origin of the idea of the eternal return of the same, not as cosmology or metaphysics but as an inspiring, existential imperative, I will consult the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. If I want to understand offensive strategy when playing hockey, I will defer to the heroic exploits and battle burnished wisdom of Wayne Gretzky. Many humans have acquired authority in a given domain of theory or practice by virtue of their excellence in said domain.

However, there are those who wrongly infer that their expertise in realm X makes them de facto experts in realms Y or Z. Schulz even contemplated running for president of the United States in 2020, having never had any experience as a democratically elected representative of any constituency. He came to his senses eventually, as this article attests, but the delusion was born, and lived longer than it had any right to do because he is extremely wealthy:

The Oleato is another, ugly child of this tendency to assume that excellence in one realm betokens excellence in all realms. Simply because a wealthy and powerful human believes a given idea is a good one, we have no reason to assume that it is, in fact, a good idea. The Oleato is a potable proof of this claim. Spurn it as you would spurn a rabid weasel.