But as a speedster, Barry was really too poor.
There was no helping it. If he used the Speed Force to boost his work efficiency, his consumption would increase as well. Put simply, he would need to eat more.
High-calorie foods generally contained lots of butter or fat. It was not that Barry could not eat vegetables to replenish his strength, but that would only mean eating even more.
Common high-calorie foods in the United States were basically fried chicken and pizza. The whole point of these foods being invented as fast food was that they were filling and could provide enough calories for manual laborers.
Take the cheapest budget pizza with no brand value whatsoever. A twelve-inch large pizza usually cost around twelve US Dollars. After running, Barry needed to eat roughly ten to fifteen of them in one meal, and that was assuming he had not gone through intense combat or overdrawn his body.
A simple calculation showed that a sizable portion of his salary went toward food. As for what remained, after rent, utilities, and other necessary bills, Barry had a small hobby: he liked modifying cars.
Although Su Ming knew that in his previous life, people said the poor played with cars while the rich played with watches, things were quite different in the DC Universe.
The first Batmobile Batman built—the one that looked as bulky as a tank—had cost one billion US Dollars just to make. His later, cooler upgraded Batmobiles that could fly, burrow, and dive were each more expensive than the last.
Expensive things were not necessarily pretty, but generally speaking, things that looked outrageously cool were very expensive.
So Barry's hobby of playing with cars did not really suit his spending power, especially since his Flashmobile needed plenty of high-tech equipment installed,