Have you ever been at a restaurant, looked at your menu options, chose a dish that seemed reasonably appetizing, then looked at the price and suddenly regretted all of your life decisions up to that point? Yea it's rather unfortunate how often that happens, actually. Of course, your choice of restaurant could be a reason for such exorbitant prices, but there's also a highly large chance that it's because of what the dish is made of. High-grade ingredients directly correlate to high-cost food. One particularly insane little luxury found in the most choice of dishes is saffron.
Saffron is a spice that has a number of uses that vary from flavoring dishes to dyeing clothes. However, let's say you want to play fancy, schmancy french chef for the day and decide that your dinner idea must be absolutely authentic, so you can only use the most excellent of ingredients. So, hypothetical you decides to go to a market and buy some real, quality strands of saffron, but then you see it is really expensive. How expensive? Well, how about 1 gram costing you about $80? Yea, so about that dinner...
But really, it's an itty-bitty little red, thready spice, why is it costing about half of my college tuition? In economic terms, it's because of scarcity. Saffron isn't exactly one of the most plentiful spices out there, as the business of producing it has reduced quite a bit from the olden days of the spice trade. Okay, but just look at those prices! Imagine the money you'll be drowning in if you just grew saffron! Suddenly you think you're just the smartest person alive, figured out all of your money problems, and succeeded in life. Except when you don't. Now you find yourself, once again, regretting all of your life decisions.
As it turns out, growing saffron is unbelievably tedious. The reason why saffron is so scarce is because people just don't really want to make that effort in making the saffron. These non-price affecting factors are what keeps the supply of saffron on the down low. The cost of productivity and labor just outweigh the desire, or incentive, to get a hold on the saffron business. Not to mention that saffron isn't even that universally coveted of a spice. The demand isn't the most overwhelming of curves, because the Eastern Asian and European dishes that generally do involve saffron can typically find some reasonably cheaper substitutes like turmeric to do just as well of a job at dyeing the foods as saffron does. Of course, as per the article, there are those brave souls who do genuinely enjoy the saffron business and don't mind the process of preparing these spices. But, to other people out there, the task all just seems like an effective waste of time. Saffron comes from the stigmas of the crocus flower. Each flower has three stigmas, but you can't exactly just pluck them out and be done with that. A farmer has to remove the three stigmas, lay them out on racks, and let them air dry for 24 hours. What a tedious process. And, to really kick you when you're down, those three stigmas barely count as much of anything. To get any semblance of a successful business, a person would need to sell many grams of it, and to get even 90 grams requires tens of thousands of flowers. That's quite a bit of effort for quite a bit of nothing.
But hey, to each his own. Saffron is still a prosperous business for some people out there, so if watching flower stems cycle through life to nice little wrinkly baby sticks of its former self in a span of 24 hours is totally your thing, no one is stopping you.
Website cited: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2823029/How-ounce-saffron-expensive-gold-Cultivation-exotic-spice-returns-Essex-time-200-years.html
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