Spices are often far pricier proportionately than the foods they flavor.
But one's cost has long topped them all.
Saffron's red threads regularly run at rates over 600 US dollars an ounce.
So why is this so-called red gold so expensive?
Spices come from different plant parts.
Saffron is the only one made of flower stigmas.
They're plucked from a flowering plant called a crocus.
Different crocus species dot countrysides across Eurasia and North Africa, and it appears that humans began harvesting wild crocuses quite a way back.
Ancient cave paintings in what's now Iraq derived colors from crocus pigments.
However, this paint was probably created with a different type of crocus because it's thought that the saffron crocus developed relatively recently when a single wild crocus produced a seed carrying an extra set of chromosomes.
