Fancy taking some coffee with a waft of cat pooh? Then you are the right customer for the most pricey coffee in the world – Kopi Luwak coffee ! The civet cats eat the berries and other parts of the plants. Apparently the berries do not get digested but instead they make their way smoothly through the gastric systems where the enzymes do their best to take away the bitterness of the coffee. When they pass them out as pooh, the ‘gold diggers’ carefully search through the waste for these precious beans. Then they are washed, dried and ground into a smooth tasting coffee with the most amazing aroma all for a whopping $80 that is about 69,000 Rwandan francs per kilo. Elephants also are used as a channel for the coffee cherries

If you thought that was weird and at the same time expensive, you need to get ready for the next one! Bird’s Nest Soup created from bird saliva is rich and delicious – its fans assert. Rich in the sense that it is fifty percent protein and other food values consist the other portions. The birds called swiftlings create their nests by using their saliva after which the nests harden. When they are ‘harvested’ they are put into water which softens them into a soup and bingo, for up to one hundred dollars (that is about 86,000 Rwandan francs) you can get yourself a bowl. And if you are thinking of a kilo, then you need to get ten thousand dollars ready, for a kilogram of this most expensive food of all time!

Then of course the famous caviar, which are fish eggs!

But why are they costly, these foods, one may wonder? Well for starters, they are very hard to get and this makes them a rare delicacy – the harder it is, the costlier a product becomes. Take for instance, the birds’ nests are found very high up in extremely steep areas. Getting even one tiny nest is a major feat so the cost shoots up. They are very nutritious too, so that is a bonus for the consumer! These types of foods have been made popular by those famous people who eat them and so everyone wants to consume them and be famous too. For whatever reason, these foods and more in their category have made their mark on the food map because of their distinct flavor!

Lois Nakibuuka is an educator and counsellor