Those words were overheard at the airport before my flight back to San Francisco. Immediately, I blurted out “Not crab or avocado”, but this just begged for some math to drive the point home.

So, let’s say that crab costs $3.50 per pound in San Francisco and $13.00 per pound in Cleveland. How much crab would you have to eat in order to make cost of living comparable?

Let’s just look at rent. Our rent in SF is a very reasonable $2920 per month. Admittedly, we have a nice place, so let’s say a comparable place in Cleveland would go for $1100.

So we’re paying $1820 more in rent than we would in CLE.

So let’s run the numbers:

We’re looking at a $9.50 difference in price between crab, so for every pound we eat in SF, we’re *saving* $9.50. That comes to 191.58 pounds per month or 6.39 pounds per day (for a 30 day month). Admittedly, that sounds like a lot of crab to eat every day, but most of the weight comes from shell and inedible junk (damn those exoskeletons). Let’s say that 1/3 of a crab’s weight goes into the meat yield, then we’re looking at a somewhat reasonable 2.13 pounds of crab per day.
Ten crab cakes require about a pound and a half of crab meat, so a typical day would include crab cakes for dinner and around a half-pound of crab salad or something for lunch. Or, if you would like to spice it up a bit, you could throw some crab in your breakfast eggs.

There you have it, if your diet includes more than 2.12 pounds of crab per day it’s actually cheaper to live in SF than in Cleveland.

And I didn’t even factor in avocado.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.