In this article, I track the contemporary possibilities for the global circulation of extravirgin olive oil. Recent technoscientific discoveries about the health benefits of extravirgin olive oil combine with narratives about olive oil's “ancientness” and “naturalness” to make it a very successful food commodity in an era of global concern about the risks of “industrial” food. “The Mediterranean” has emerged as a culture area that is defined by food in two realms: in a scientific register (“the Mediterranean Diet”) and in contemporary gustatory discourses of distinction that imagine “the Mediterranean” as a site of delicious, “real” food as opposed to the industrial, processed food of the North Atlantic.

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This article examines the complex relationships between changing forms of commodity production and consumption and changing styles of religiosity in Zabid, the Republic of Yemen. I examine a couple of prominent logics of veiling in Fin‐de‐Siècle Yemen: Some reformist women add “Islamic socks” and gloves to their already fully modest garb, while other women don chadors that decorate these garments with embroidery, making them into items of fashionable consumption and adornment. Other commodities, like a Chador Barbie that I found in Yemen's suq, are used to think through changing practices of consumption, adornment, and women's sociability in Zabid.