Foie Gras

Foie Gras is French for “fat liver” and it’s called that because that’s exactly what it is. Foie Gras is the fat liver of a duck or a goose. It’s a French luxury food item that will cost you roughly 50-60 dollars a pound, or one little appetizer of foie gras will be the same price as a full entree meal at a nice restaurant. It’s so expensive because it is labor intensive to produce. What they do is force feed ducks and geese through feeding tubes to make them and their livers nice and fat. Over feeding birds for food has been in practice ever since ancient Egyptian times in 2500 bc. As you can imagine this practice is seen as controversial to a lot of people and it is well regulated by governments, adding to it’s price.

Kopi Luwak

This next expensive food item is very odd. Kopi Luwak or often called Civet coffee is coffee that has been eaten and partially digestive by the Asian palm civet (cat-like animal) then defecated out and collected for use. So it’s not a special kind of coffee that makes it so expensive it’s the process of how it’s harvested. They say the process of how the palm civet selects the coffee it wants to eat combined with the acid in it’s stomach make the coffee taste better. It must be better because it’s 700 dollars per kilogram. That’s some expensive a** coffee. Kopi Luwak has been around since the colonial times. When the Dutch coffee plantation owners forbade the native workers from collecting coffee for their own personal use, the natives saw that the palm civet pooped out coffee so they collected that up and made their own. Word soon got to the plantation owners and they gave the poop coffee a try too.

Wagyu Beef

Wagyu Beef means Japanese beef. There are only four breeds of Japanese cattle; Japanese Black, Japanese Brown, Japanese Short horn and Japanese Poll. Wagyu beef is so prized and sought after because of the beef’s intramuscular fat content that makes it so tender and delicious. It’s also what gives it that famed marbled appearance. Some of the most expensive wagyu beef (Kolbe beef) can go for over $600 for a kilogram (2.2 pounds). If you want to eat a wagyu steak at a restaurant be prepared to shell out like 25-45$ per ounce. The cattle are raised to taste good so they are treated good. They are given beer to drink (to increase their appetite), they are massaged and they listen to classical music to make sure they are always calm.

Iberico ham

Iberico ham is the most expensive ham in the world. It is made in Spain and Portugal from purebred Iberian free range pigs that only eat acorns. Once the pig has been slaughtered it is then cured for 36 months. The most one of these hams has gone for is 3,192.76 English pounds. That’s just over 4 grand in American dollars. When you buy one you receive a special certificate of the pig’s DNA lineage and the ham’s authentication. That’s one expensive Christmas dinner.

White Truffle

Truffles are a type of species of fungi and some truffles are highly prized luxury foods. White Truffles are at the top of this list mainly for their flavor. What makes White Truffles so special is how rare they are. They can only be picked in the wild. Many people have tried to farm them but failed. White truffles are found in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy and only grow under certain trees. So combined with their scarcity and the labor that goes into finding them White Truffles come with a hefty price. The most a single White Truffle has sold for was over $300,000 for one of the largest ever found. It weight just over 1.5 kg. That’s one big fungus. It was purchased by the billionaire casino owner Stanley Ho in 2007.

Caviar

I’m sure most people have heard of caviar but probably don’t know what exactly it is. Caviar is the pickled roe of the Sturgeon fish. The roe of a fish simply means its eggs. However, caviar wasn’t always a luxury food for rich people. In fact back when there was tons of Sturgeon fish still in the seas it was a relatively cheap commodity. Sometimes it was given away in bars and saloons like nuts. But now since most of the Sturgeon fish species are endangered, caviar is scarce. Since it’s scarce then its supply is low and since the demand for it is so high then the price for it will also be high. That’s just basic economics. Also, the Sturgeon fish takes several years to become fully mature to produce its eggs, sometimes almost 2 decades. The most expensive caviar on record is from an extremely rare albino beluga sturgeon (who was 100 years old). The caviar sold for $34,500 per kilogram.

Saffron

Saffron is a spice that is used as a coloring agent in food. Its nickname is “red gold” because weight for weight it is more valuable than gold. Saffron comes for the crocus flower and it only flowers for a week or two every year in Autumn. It is very labor intensive to harvest saffron. It has to be done by hand and each flower produces very little of the saffron. About a football field of flowers would yield 1 kilogram of saffron. That is an estimated 300,000 flowers and keep in mind each flower must be harvested by hand, no wonder it’s so expensive. It usually goes for $3,000 per kilogram.

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