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A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0]. If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat. That's about 0.016
by notch656a 4y ago
A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0].
If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.
That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.
[0] https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.16.06%20Ancient_Coins_Sidebar.pdf https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.1...
- porknubbins 4y agoThats an interesting way of looking at it, but seems kind of misleading to use a cow. Pigs can live anywhere and eat pretty much anything and are a much more common meat. Beef has always been a luxury meat in most places.
- notch656a 4y agoBeef was cheaper than pork, porknubbins. https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-economy/roman-goods-prices/ https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-economy/roman-goods-pric...
- porknubbins 4y agoWow not what I would have expected, though a lot of my intuition about Rome is probably wrong. I respect your effort in looking up ancient pork prices. I may have to change to Beefnubbins.
- pencilguin 4y agoCows can eat what people can't. This may have been the source of the semitic proscription on pork: that they compete with people for the same calories. Of course now we feed cows mostly corn. If everyone gave up eating meat from animals fed farm output, the looming climate catastrophe would just fade away.