Saffron

Saffron is the dried stigma of Crocus sativus. Each flower produces three, they must be picked by hand at dawn during a flowering season of a couple of weeks, and it takes somewhere near a hundred and fifty thousand flowers to make a kilogram. There is no mechanised alternative and there has never been one, which is why saffron has been the most expensive spice by weight for as long as anyone has recorded prices.

That is the point of using it as an offering. Burned or strewn or dissolved, saffron is a way of putting something extremely costly beyond recovery, and Persian and Indian ritual use it in exactly that register. It is added to the milk and water poured over images, mixed into sandalwood paste for the mark applied to the forehead, and strewn at shrines.

It is also the dye. The ochre and orange of Buddhist and Hindu renunciate robes is nominally saffron, though in practice the colour is far more often achieved with turmeric, jackfruit wood or ochre, since actual saffron dye at that scale is unaffordable and fades quickly.

The plant is sterile and does not set seed. Every Crocus sativus in the world is a corm division of another, propagated by hand, which makes the entire crop a single very old clone.

The oldest clear evidence for saffron is on Thera. The frescoes at Akrotiri, buried by the eruption around 1600 BCE, show women picking crocus flowers and presenting the stigmas to a seated goddess, with a monkey handing baskets up to her. It is an unusually explicit depiction of a harvest as a religious act, and it establishes both the crop and its ritual use in the Bronze Age Aegean.

Iran now produces the overwhelming majority of the world crop, roughly ninety percent, concentrated in Khorasan. Kashmir, Afghanistan, Morocco, Spain, Greece and Italy make up most of the rest. Sanctions and export routing mean a substantial share of Iranian saffron reaches consumers labelled as Spanish, which is a long-standing and well documented practice in the trade.

Adulteration is old and constant. Safflower, turmeric, dyed maize silk and shredded paper have all been sold as saffron, and medieval Nuremberg burned adulterators at the stake under the Safranschou code, which indicates both the scale of the problem and the value of the product.

The labour is the cost. Picking is done before the sun opens the flowers, the stigmas are separated by hand the same day, and the work is seasonal, poorly paid and largely done by women. That has not changed in three and a half thousand years.