I love olives; they're my main source of salty/sour flavor in my diet. I eat maybe 2-3 lbs. a month, all from olive bars in NYC. I was kind of shocked the other day when I was at Westside Market and a lot of their "fresh" (plastic containers rather than glass jars) olives were labeled as having CANOLA OIL in them. WTF? I asked about it, and nobody could give me a straight answer; mostly they speculated that, "No, this must be an error."
Now I'm getting paranoid. Just as I was unwittingly eating a significant amount of soy oil at Chipotle on a regular basis, I fear that this may be happening with olives too (but with canola). Help me not have to ask everywhere I go: If a bucket of olives has an oddly thick oil, is this a sign of something? Do I just have to ask who a store's olive distributor is and be able to know from that? There's no way I'm going to start importing pallets of hard olives and home curing them.