Growing up in Cyprus, Tassos Kyriakides loved visiting a local olive mill. It was close to his elementary school, so he and his classmates would often take field trips there.
Inside the mill, local producers would press their olives, extracting the olive oil in the process, and stack the olives on big, round pieces of mesh fabric, similar to what's used in potato sacks. The olives would be stacked high, and a massive stone would put pressure on the stack.
"You would see this green liquid oozing out of this thing that looked like 20 to 30 stacked pancakes," remembers Kyriakides, who is now an assistant professor of biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). The producers would then collect the liquid, some would filter it, and put it in containers.
