Thats 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.
Wow 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.
Cows 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.
