One Hour One Life Forums

There are many kinds of effiency.  Pip effiency, iron efficiency, water/soil effiency, labor/time effiency, etc.   A food item might have a high pip effiency, but very low cost effiency, in terms of labor or resource use.

It is not always easy to calculate the true cost of the final product, because there are many factors.   For example, it costs you a lot more initial investment of time/resources to make three sisters stew, compared with popcorn, but a single crock produces many bowls of stews that each provide two large bites of food.  Popcorn is pip-efficient and relatively time efficient too, but stew can keep a lot of adults fed and is very space efficient and handy.  A good stew maker can supply a village with a stable food source that will feed people for many years.  By comparison, trying to provide the same kind of food station using popcorn would require occupying dozen of bowls with popcorn and a bunch of floor space.  People would be wasting popcorn to empty bowls so they could be used for other things or carrying popcorn bowls away and forgetting them in weird places.   And when the bowls were all empty or scattered, would anyone think to make more popcorn?   Doubtful.

There's a really good reason why the majority of villages have berries and mutton pies as the staple food.  Other foods are nice supplements, but meat pies are the best food for travellers, because it is pip-dense, packable, and has multiple uses.  And a properly tended berry patch provides a safe food station for children and elderly.   

Worrying about a few "wasted pips" when you eat a mutton pie at 4 pips of hunger is useless.   It just means there is very little practical difference between eating a rabbit pie, mutton pie, or rabbit with berry/carrot pie, other than yum bonuses.