today in my economic botany class we learned why saffron is so expensive and i gotta go to work but im making this post to remind myself to talk about it later bc holy shit lmao
today in my economic botany class we learned about the ‘enfleurage’ method of extraction of pure essential oils from raw flower parts for expensive luxury perfumes and i need to tell yall about both of these things bc wow high end plant products sure are turning out to be something
okay i have *checks time* half an hour before i gotta TA so im gonna try and do a speed essay here
saffron
saffron is a plant in the iris family (it’s specifically a crocus) just to give a general idea of what it might look like, and it’s native to the Mediterranean, although it’s also grown commercially in Spain and Portugal. it’s used for both a spice for taste and for the bright yellow dye it produces, but including it in either of these things drives the price of the resulting product up immensely due mostly to the price of saffron alone. this is because only the stigmas of the flowers are used, and it all has to be processed by hand. so the female part of the flower that captures the pollen? only that. nothing else
so not only does an entire field of saffron only yield like….a few pounds of usable product, but people have to 1. go out and hand-remove the flowers and put them in baskets and 2. bring the baskets back to processing centers where people sit around tables with tweezers and deadass pluck out the stigmas. to give an idea of what this looks like, this is the flower:
the stigmas are the red things. those are the only usable portions of this. this is what processing looks like (this is in Afghanistan):
that little pile of red stuff is the actual product. note the huge amount of discarded flowers and the pollen from the anthers covering the workers’ gloves.
the resulting lot of actual useable saffron product is so valuable that they transport the initial lot in armored trucks to another facility to be dried, and then they’re split up into smaller lots based on quality to be packaged and stuff. i’ve personally never frequented like….any High End Spice Shops or anything, but my botany professor says that when u purchase saffron here in the states it comes in a tiny spice jar with a little foil packet inside holding a precious couple stigmas, and apparently it’s normal for that amount of saffron to cost $25+. so like. wild
fuck i dont have time to do talk about enfleurage rn but i’ll add onto this post with it when i can
