Eating meat by the mouthful and downing bowl after bowl of wine was probably something everyone had fantasized about, but there was no denying that the novels and television dramas of that era had played a major part in it. Anyone who had read Water Margin had dreamed of going into a restaurant, ordering a few taels of cooked beef and a few bowls of wine, then heading up a mountain to fight a tiger after getting drunk. Only later did they discover that cooked beef was so damn expensive!
At that age when boys were at their most hot-blooded and full of grandiose fantasies, a boy who wanted to become a great hero would excitedly head into a restaurant, then learn for the first time what it meant for a single penny to bring even a mighty hero low.
"...Master, why is beef so expensive?" Heath was explaining some tricks of the culinary trade to May at the time. Whatever he had been talking about, May suddenly came out with that question, leaving him momentarily stunned. It took him quite a while to work out why she had suddenly asked that. After all, he remembered that he had only been talking about things like the tricks to buying groceries, and he had not expected her to suddenly take an interest in beef. Still, her question was rather interesting. Heath had once been curious about it himself. Beef really was expensive, after all, and some beef products were outrageously pricey.
"Because most beef is costly to raise. Also, when making certain beef products, a kilogram of beef might only yield five hundred grams of the finished product, so naturally the price goes up." Heath thought of a street food from his previous life, something delicious that also hurt the wallet: