its kind of hard to frame this question in a highly scientific way. talked about it a couple of years ago when fedi was a more fun place.

it comes down to you can do something like pick some dietary staples and use that to track the cost of living in different states, but this still doesn't work because ex. india doesn't eat moos.

there's also an iterative problem that peasants choose food based on availability so even that complicates shit (ex. lobster used to be peasant food)

its genuinely Difficult(tm) to put an objective measure on which living locales are experiencing a genuine skill issue