Amazing Fact About Most Expensive Food Items

One of the world’s most expensive food items is made from bird saliva.

For more than 400 years, bird’s nest soup has long been one of the most expensive foods in the world, and even today a single bowl of it costs between $30 and $100. You can’t just make it out of any bird’s nest. Only the edible nest of the cave swiftlet will do, a nest made entirely out of the bird’s saliva. These nests are high in calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium. They are hard when harvested, but partially dissolve into a more jelly-like consistency when boiled into soup.

Cave swiftlets nest high up on sheer rock walls inside pitch-dark caves, where they build sticky nests out of their own saliva. Traditionally, these nests could be harvested only by climbing on ladders up into the heights of these caves, a difficult and fairly dangerous undertaking. Today the swiftlets are encouraged to build their nests in artificially constructed concrete nesting houses. Even so, the harvested nests still sell for as much as $10,000 per kilogram.

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Amazing Fact About Coffee

The world’s most expensive coffee, kopi luwak (literally, “civet coffee”) is brewed from coffee beans that have been eaten and partially digested by the Asian palm civet, a catlike wild animal. The beans are harvested from the droppings of the civet and washed, and can be brewed into an aromatic coffee renowned for its low bitterness and excellent flavor.

According to coffee critic Chris Rubin, “The aroma is rich and strong, and the coffee is incredibly full bodied, almost syrupy. It’s thick with a hint of chocolate, and lingers on the tongue with a long, clean aftertaste.” A pound of kopi luwak can cost anywhere from $100 to $3,000, and a single cup may cost as much as $80. 

Traditionally, the coffee was so rare because harvesters had to scour the rainforest floor looking for civet droppings that contained coffee beans. In recent years, some people have started caging wild civets and feeding them the beans directly.

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