4

Spice Markets Can Be Very, Very Gross

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One time in 2014, I was in a spice market in Jakarta. Usually, I go straight to the farmers themselves, but I needed to find a local seller. The spices were just laid in heaps on the ground. One kid working at the market licked his fingers clean every time he switched spice piles. I saw a woman swat a rat straight into her pile of red chilies. Sometimes, your rare imported Indonesian chilies really do get their extra kick from the exotic soil. Other times, it's rat urine.

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Remember that, no matter how exotic, no food is supposed to have "subtle hints" of ammonia.

3

Customs Might Mistake You For A Drug Dealer

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If you've ever come home from a trip abroad with exotic foodstuffs that you'll insufferably work into every conversation you have for the next few months, your story probably doesn't include getting the shakedown from customs agents. It's a little different when you're packing whole pallets of shrink-wrapped powders.

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"'Spice?' Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?"

I've been doing this for years, so most of the customs workers know me. As long as I have the paperwork and everything checks out, I'm all set. But that trust was hard-earned. I made some rookie mistakes on my first bulk order. Instead of saying I was a spice importer, I said I was a spice dealer. Sounds way cooler, right? Really grabs attention. Yeah, yours and the customs officials. Indonesian suppliers grind their nutmeg, so my shipment was all powder. Fun fact: Ground nutmeg is a shade of brown remarkably similar to some kinds of heroin. They brought in the dogs.

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But at least as an innocent, he could rest easy in his 44 percent chance of not triggering a false positive.

2

Saffron Is Worth More Than Gold

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Saffron goes for more than $1,500 a pound, making it literally worth more than its weight in gold. That's because it's a bitch to grow. It only thrives on a scalable level in a few countries -- Spain, Italy, Turkey, Iran, and India -- because it needs such precise climate conditions. Most of the world's saffron is grown in Iran, which you may recognize as basically the country that America restricts trading with. They do make a partial exception in the case of saffron, because Axis of Evil be damned, we're not sacrificing Masala Monday.

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No international conflict is ever worth sacrificing the luxury of eating dried plant genitals.

There's no buying in bulk, because saffron's sky-high demand is matched only by its ludicrously low supply. Even in the best-case scenario, farms only harvest a tiny amount of the crop. Those little red tendrils come two per flower, and that's it. You need 250,000 flowers for an ounce of saffron. If you're ordering saffron for your restaurant, you'd better know precisely how much you need. Much like the big spice companies, I only sell Saffron 1/20th of an ounce at a time.

Eli Duke/Wiki Commons
Split it up stateside. Customs is complicated enough without introducing tiny baggies into the mix.

1

Spice Smuggling Is A Thriving, Dangerous Practice

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If you hear "spice merchant" and your mind jumps to naval battles and Mongol hordes, you'll be happy to learn there's still an illicit side to the trade. Even having a few poppy seeds on you can mean a four-year jail sentence in the United Arab Emirates, since they equate them with opium usage.

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You don't want to get stopped at the border with this kind of haul.

Meanwhile, other spices have become so expensive that India, a top producer, has a huge smuggling problem. For example, smuggled Iranian saffron is far cheaper than the legal stuff, so the Indian mafia runs a Saffron ring so expansive that police arrest three smugglers a day, on average. Mules cross the border any way they can, and because the return on investment is so high, they're about as expendable as a stormtrooper wearing a red shirt. So in a way, the dumb jokes that kicked off this article weren't entirely wrong. People do still die for spices.

Evan V. Symon is a personal experience team member and interview-finder guy at Cracked. Have an awesome experience you want to share with us? Hit up the tip lines at tips@cracked.com!

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