"You know, I'm going to share something that will completely change the way you think about spending money. A long while ago, when I was a child, food was less abundant in Bulgaria, so I had an ingenious idea -That we would buy the least expensive food, which was beans at the time, costing about 60 cents a bag. Many other people thought this way, so we were able to feed ourselves. We made it. It took hours to cook and the stoves in Europe run on electricity instead of gas, which by the way, happens to be less expensive than electricity, so in reality it was the most expensive food, because of the amount of fuel used during the time required to cook it. Bulgaria is not a very rich country, so we spend resources where we have the most of them. The effort required to do something uses a combination of resources, usually 3 or more. Time is a constant, labor is the second constant, and the third resource and onward varies depending on what a person is trying to do. A bit of backstory that helps highlight the situation to Bulgaria's financial poverty... After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many countries returned to Capitalism, of course, when something is newer, people don't know how to think, because they aren't used to it, they need more time to catch up to something older, so any change is negative at first, especially an entire political system. For a while, there were very few business owners, previously all businesses were Government owned, there were no rich people to make their own business, it was chaos. This lasted for a while, although I was born a bit later. Anyway, the last words I want to leave you with is that theres more factors to economics than just supply and demand, and you have to take all them into account when making financial decisions. And the grand finale? -If everyone brought the cheapest healthy food available, no I don't mean chips and the like, then it would eventually become the most expensive food, and then move on to the next. So theres really a lot of things to think about from these examples. P.S. Although, from experimentation, which I remembered recently, you can soak beans in water overnight and then they only take half an hour to cook. If I recall correctly, I wondered what would happen if we leave them in water for a while before cooking them, and asked my dad. He said to put water on a sponge which we had used for cleaning, the sponge absorbed the water. While I was holding it in my hand I replied "I'm not sure if this would take longer to cook or shorter [by which I meant if the beans were soaked with water while comparing them to the sponge in my hand.] He replied that it was a good idea, and we tried. The only negative thing is that they tasted a bit less good than before, but it saved a lot of effort cooking them... [Realistically, if I were to cook beans or even something which requires a shorter soak in water, like lentils, I would most definitely do it in both Bulgaria and the US. Here because the stoves run on natural gas, which is a non-renewable resource, and pollutes by creating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when lit. This way the food would cook in 1/4th the time, so it would pollute less if a lot of people in the US did this."]

-belthagor