Lots of us only ask one question when we head to the grocery store: what’s on sale? (At least that’s what I do.) If you’re flush with cash, though, even buying mundane staple foods can turn into an exercise in conspicuous consumption. Let’s take a look at a few super pricey pantry mainstays that will set you back a bit more than the store brands.
1. Milk Your Wallet for All It’s Worth
Should you find yourself stressed out in Japan and in desperate need of a glass of milk, Nakazawa Foods has just the thing for you. In 2007 the company introduced Adult Milk, a special formulation of the white stuff that supposedly helps relieve stress. The (cash) cows that produce the product are milked once a week at dawn, which is allegedly the peak time for melatonin production in cattle. This carefully timed milking results in a product that has up to four times as much of the stress-relieving hormone as regular milk. The price tag is decidedly less soothing, though: over $40 for a quart.
2. Don’t Skimp on the Olive Oil
What to do if your wallet is dangerously full and you want to drizzle olive oil on some bread? Order a bottle of Lambda. The extra virgin olive oil bills itself as “the most expensive olive oil in the world,” and it retails for around $50 for a 500 ml bottle. According to the oil’s maker, Speiron Co., its hand-picked olives are cold-pressed within eight hours of being picked from trees in Crete. The unfiltered finished product supposedly boasts an intensely fruity flavor and a very low acidity.
3. Sweetness Comes at a Price
Lambda made international news when famed London department store Harrods started offering the oil, but its shelfmate Life Mel Honey is no slouch, either. The honey, which goes for over $80 per 120g jar, is made in Israel by bees that are fed a strict diet of herbs that includes ginseng and Echinacea. It’s more than just an expensive trend, though. The honey’s makers tout it as the only honey that has been demonstrated in a clinical study to alleviate the side effects of chemotherapy. (Scientists later questioned the validity of these claims due to the tiny size of the clinical study.) Still, customers ranging from chemo patients to celebrities like Sienna Miller have snapped up the supposedly health-affirming honey.
4. Enjoy Your Coffee After a Weasel Does
Sure, the cup of joe you sip every morning wakes you up, but has it ever seen the inside of a weasel’s stomach? If you’re lucky enough to have an authentic mug of kopi luwak, it has. This Southeast Asian delicacy, which Miss Cellania mentioned last month in her round-up of creative uses for poop, is just like normal coffee, only it passes through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet, a weasel-like critter, before it ever sees the inside of a pot. The result is a full-bodied coffee with little bitterness that can fetch anywhere from $100 a cup to $600 a pound.
Sure, it sounds gross, but kopi luwak devotees swear by the stuff. Farmed civets are fed fresh coffee berries, which they devour for their pulpy fruit, and the beans come out the other end a day or two later. During their stay in the civets’ bellies, the beans interact with digestive enzymes that break down their protein structures and change their flavors. After the civet defecates the beans, farmers wash, dry, and roast them to make the world’s priciest coffee. [Image by Wie146.]
5. Masa Super Premium: No Weak Cup of Tea
Just because you’ve sworn off coffee in favor of green tea doesn’t mean that you have to keep your wallet closed. In fact, there’s a green tea out there that makes kopi luwak look downright frugal. Last December, Japanese manufacturer Royal Blue Tea introduced a new product called Masa Super Premium. The bottled tea was made from rare handpicked leaves from Shizuoka Prefecture that were then infused for three days. The resulting liquid was poured into 750 ml wine bottles that were available for a cool $2,500 apiece.
6. Water with a Side of Bling
If tap water just isn’t doing it for you anymore, you can pick up a bottle of Bling H20. The trendy bottled water comes from a spring in Tennessee and undergoes a nine-step purification process that involves filtration and an ozone treatment. It’s then poured into a 750 ml frosted-glass bottle adorned with Swarovski crystals. Want a bottle? It will set you back at least $40.
Of course, that’s fairly inexpensive compared to a bottle of Hawaii Deep Marine’s Kona Nigari seawater, a concentrate that fetches $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. The water, which comes from 2000 feet beneath the surface off of Hawaii’s coast, is prized in Japan as a dietary supplement that reduces stress, aids weight loss, and eases digestion. A 2004 USA Today story reported that the company was sending 80,000 of the two-ounce bottles to Japan each day.
7. No Small Potatoes
Think it’s impossible to go broke eating potatoes? Think again. The French La Bonnotte potato can set you back over $300 a pound, which could lead to some awfully pricey French fries. The potato is harvested only during the first week of May on the French island of Noirmoutier and is so fragile that it has to be pulled up by hand. (This isn’t the hardiest of plants; it almost went extinct between the World Wars and needs to be fertilized with seaweed.) Some years the yield is as low as 20,000 kilograms, which further drives up prices for the coveted tuber, which is noted for its slightly salty, lemony flavor.
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Milked once a week? Those poor, poor cows. Cows that produce milk need to be milked frequently to relieve the pressure, preferably twice a day.
(Not to mention that I’d be more than hesitant to drink milk that had been steeping in a cow’s udder for a whole WEEK.)
posted by G on 3-4-2010 at 1:03 pm
I think the big winner is still the civet crap coffee, haha
IIRC the discovery of coffee involved the digestive tracts of goats…
posted by Troy H. on 3-4-2010 at 1:21 pm
I am having flashbacks to the Tuscan Milk Reviews on Amazon.
Captcha is appropriately “rich sardined.”
posted by Nicole on 3-4-2010 at 1:22 pm
And here I thought Matsuzaka beef was ridiculous!
posted by amaneaux on 3-4-2010 at 1:37 pm
I am going to slap down a big BOGUS on the Nakazawa milk.
I grew up working on dairy farms. If you don’t milk a cow at least twice a day, she dries up. Cows are not like chickens (who lay eggs no matter what), they only produce milk when their calf needs it. Once the calf is weened, they stop producing. Humans fool the cow’s utters by keeping the milk flowing.
If you only milk a cow once a week, she will dry up and there will not be any milk until the next time she calfs.
The possibilities are this:
The snippet was mistranslated.
The cow is being pumped full of artificial hormones to keep her milk flowing unnaturally, which probably reduces the health value of the milk.
A soulless marketer is bilking the ignorant.
posted by n2y2 on 3-4-2010 at 1:57 pm
ah – kopi luwak – jack Nicholson’s favorite drink in the movei THE BUCKET LIST!
I still think its totally disgusting though
posted by Scott T. on 3-4-2010 at 2:06 pm
I feel like this is PROOF that the Japanese need a country-wide CAT scan appointment. These are people who will apparently buy anything that promises health benefits. They will even buy USED PANTIES out of a VENDING MACHINE. Oi…
posted by Kate on 3-4-2010 at 4:13 pm
I tend to doubt that Olive Oil’s claim to fame. I can find half a dozen olive oils for sale at higher prices than that just by doing a quick search on Amazon. $50 for half a liter of Olive Oil is certainly pricey, but it’s by no means way out of line with the general pricing on first cold press olive oils.
posted by Jacquilynne on 3-4-2010 at 4:19 pm
Many tried and true quotes come to mind:
“A fool and his money are soon parted”
“There’s a sucker born every minute”
My personal favorite,from my dear departed mother:
“What? Are you nuts?”
posted by Eileen on 3-4-2010 at 6:10 pm
heh…I just had to comment because the reCaptcha was “card difficulty” (something I imagine happens if one were to try to purchase a few of the items listed…)
posted by C on 3-4-2010 at 7:19 pm
There’s a town in the Philippines where you can get a cup of the kopi luwak for roughly $3. I went there in late 2008 and saw a display of unprocessed beans. I asked them if they had any available for consumption but they said they were still waiting for a shipment, which apparently came from two town away. I forgot to ask how much a pound costs.
When you get to Manila, the price jacks up. Maybe about 25 times or more.
posted by Lunedi on 3-4-2010 at 9:09 pm
Dairy cows are milked every 12 hours. The dairy farm I worked on, like most dairy farms, milked at 5 AM and 5 PM. So half our milk supply was produced at dawn. No big deal. And if you want melatonin, you can buy the hormone cheap in the “herbal remedy” aisle of almost any supermarket.
Are Japanese really that much more gullible than Westerners? And I thought their science education was so much better than ours!
posted by Skeptic on 3-4-2010 at 10:46 pm
@Kate I agree that the Japanese are a bit mad for “health” products with dubious qualities (I live here and there’s currently a placenta-based drink on the market that supposedly gives you a more youthful appearance), and that there are vending machines that dispense used panties. However, the used panties aren’t for health benefits, they’re for perverts.
posted by AbenaC on 3-4-2010 at 11:48 pm
I have to say that very very very few Japanese people are actually buying these products. I live in Japan and have never seen any of them for sale. Not to mention that even regular milk, other dairy products, meat, and fruit are *ridiculously* expensive in Japan. Just buying ordinary food is bad enough, I can’t imagine any of my Japanese friends actually buying the products in this article.
Judging Japanese people by these products is like judging Americans by the Victoria’s Secret Million-Dollar Bra.
posted by BlueAloe on 3-5-2010 at 9:23 am
I believe in the power of advertising – but this is a little ridiculous!!
posted by Hastings on 3-5-2010 at 11:06 am
Interesting factiod: I lived in Kona, Hawaii for many years and actually worked on the construction of the water bottling facility before it officially opened. As a thanks for our help, many of us were given 1 liter bottles of the Deep Sea water which we were told was not available for purchase in the US. I actually ended up with 2 – gave one away and eventually drank one on an especially scorching day. At retail, those bottles would have sold for about $578.00 each. Oh well, at least I’ll live longer.
posted by Dan on 3-5-2010 at 11:07 am
Blue Aloe: Indeed. Both things make it sound as if they’re common place in Japan and that regular people might buy them all the time. I lived there for five years (until last August) and never once saw anything like this, and certainly not at any normal chain. Have to echo the sentiment about *regular* food. It’s one of the few things I don’t miss about being in Japan. I love being able to buy a gallon of milk for $2 now!
posted by Jamie on 3-5-2010 at 11:22 am
Proof that P.T. Barnum was right- There IS one born every minute!
posted by chrisr on 3-7-2010 at 9:10 am