In the blistering summer heat, everyone enjoys watermelon. It was a staple during my childhood and it is one of the most fun fruits for kids to eat. Watermelon is huge, drips everywhere and you can have seed spitting contests. What's more fun for a kid than making a mess? However, if watermelon was expensive, I would have certainly grown up making a mess with other fruits.

Recently a Densuke watermelon fetched $6,100 at an auction in Japan. This is one of the most expensive melons ever sold in Japan, and I would have to imagine the rest of the world as well. At 17 pounds the cost of the fruit was about $359 per pound. I think that's more than I would fetch at an auction. For comparison, it's equivalent to 122 pounds of Godiva Dark Chocolate Truffles. This price isn't even much of a shocker for Japan where a pair of cantaloupe melons sold for $23,500 last month.

Sales of Spam are up as the inexpensive "meat product" is looking good to shoppers on a budget. It's easy to make fun of Spam. After all, it's meat that comes in a can. A can! And it's always had a reputation for being a low-end meal item. But I have fond memories of eating Spam as a kid, and we never turned our noses up at it.

With food costs on the rise, shoppers are buying more Spam in the recent months. Industry experts say the reason is simple: Spam and low-cost lunch meats are being eaten a couple of times a week instead of more expensive meat products in an effort to save money on the grocery bill.

U.S. food prices rose 4% last year and are on pace to rise 6% this year. And while the price of Spam is up 7% in the last year, it's still a cheaper alternative than many other meats. And because the canned meat keeps well in the cupboard, it's also convenient.

Spam's been around since 1937, and it looks to be going strong. Maybe now is the time for you to invest in a Spam cookbook? After all... if more households are going to be buying Spam for at least the near future, it might be worthwhile to get creative with this "other" meat.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

It's no secret that food prices are rising, but if you're curious as to how much the prices are climbing, the Department of Labor recently released its Consumer Price Index Survey, which tells you how much things have changed in the last month.

You can look it up at the Department of Labor, but so you don't have to, here's how things break down:

Cereal and bakery products: prices increased 1.3% in March for baked goods from the month before; bread increased 2.1%. That may not sound too terrible, but bread is 14.7% more costly than it was a year ago.

Recently, as I was trying to figure out ways to spend less money on groceries, I had a big "well, duh!" moment. Wandering through my local grocery store, I realized that, the more work that the food companies and store had to put into my food, the more money I had to pay. I realized that, by buying foods that were convenient for the store and doing more of my own food-prep work, I could save a large percentage of my weekly food bill. These changes individually amounted to a few cents here and there, but they quickly added up.

Fresh Food

One of the first things that I discovered is that fresh produce is really expensive. The reason is obvious: fruits and vegetable require special packaging, considerable amounts of shelf space, and a lot of TLC. Once the food gets to the store, a significant amount will have to be thrown away because it has gone bad or has been damaged in transit. When it's finally put on the shelf, it only has a limited time before it starts to rot and has to be weeded out. This means that, not only does it require special equipment and a lot of space, but it also requires trained laborers to care for it. All of that expense gets factored in to the price of the food.

Whether you prefer organic milk or orange juice for breakfast; whether coffee or cola gets you caffeinated; whether it's beef or chicken that's for dinner, you're paying more for it this month than ever before. Our friends at AOL Money & Finance took a look at a group of groceries on many people's shopping list and compared the average U.S. prices in December 2006 to the prices in December 2007. What we weren't surprised about: all these prices are higher this year than last. What we were surprised about: some of the increases are truly monumental.

You can browse through our gallery to see the ones we thought would impact us the most, and what were the highest increases -- over 30% in two cases! But I was amazed at how universal the increases were. While lemons don't make up a big portion of my grocery budget, it's shocking to see that the prices are up 23.2%. And sweet peppers, a staple in many Tex-Mex and Cajun dishes, are up 15.7%. The aforementioned orange juice, part of that complete breakfast the cereal makers are always advertising? Up 13.3%.