The Old School Deli Meat You Probably Ate If You Grew Up In The '70s

Once, olive loaf, which looks similar to bologna but is made differently and studded with sliced green olives and pimentos, was a fairly common deli meat. If you grew up in the '70s or earlier, it may have been a standard part of your lunch menu. Even if you haven't eaten it in decades, the mere mention of it may evoke vivid sensory memories, good or bad, depending on whether you liked it or not when you were a kid. For some folks, it's an old school sandwich they're happy to leave behind.

These days, you're more likely to come across it on nostalgic social media forums on sites such as Reddit or Facebook, but this deli meat does still exist in the wild. However, it is, by far, much less popular than it once was. Like its cousin bologna, which has seen a steady decline in yearly sales over the last 30 years, olive loaf and similar deli meats haven't fared well. It doesn't help that it has a hefty amount of both saturated fat and sodium: Boar's Head olive loaf has 17% of the daily value of the former and 26% of the latter.

Today, olive loaf may be somewhat of an anomaly, but its roots are as American as apple pie (or pretty close). Although olive loaf resembles Italian mortadella, they're quite different. Mortadella is an under-the-radar deli meat made from pork and studded with pistachios and cubes of fat. Olive loaf, on the other hand, is descended from loaf meats, such as head cheese, that Dutch and German settlers brought with them to the United States. Similar to how head cheese is made, the meat of olive loaf, which is typically a combination of finely ground beef and pork, is baked in pans with whole stuffed olives and various seasonings.

The exact birthdate of olive loaf is up for debate. The first reference we could find to this deli meat was a 1936 advertisement in The Houston Post for a Texas grocer called Weingarten's. It became a standard deli meat by the 1970s, to either the joy or despair of kids. For some adults who grew up on olive loaf, it's a summer picnic treat looked back on fondly. Still, based on olive loaf's standing in pop culture, where it's often derided, there seems to be more haters than fans. If you grew up in the '70s and want to revisit this lunch meat, there are several companies still producing it besides Boar's Head, including Oscar Mayer and Dietz & Watson.