No but like seriously, why are vegan and vegetarian options always MORE expensive at restaurants. Whenever I cook my self, the meat is BY FAR the most expensive part of any meal. Meanwhile stuff like soy strips are DIRT CHEAP, not to mention they last basically forever!
The canteen I go to for lunch actually sells the meatless meals for 2/3 of the price, always a taunting reminder. Like hell yea, that’s how ya convert me!
I’m really liking lemmy. A post like this in vegan reddit would have been taking down and OP called a bloodthirsty animal. Those folks are crazy.
Posts like this is how we change the minds of people and how they see food.
Imagine if legumes and grains were subsidized like animal meat and dairy is now. The meals would only cost the labor and heat energy.
Just imagine
Having heard that vegan is better my whole life, I’m convinced that it will only get subsidized/better logistics when the price of meat goes up.
And the price of meat going up will just make people into red hats angry that their burgers got taken away by the left.
Many of MAGAs don’t even understand that much of the beef industry already has subsidies. From the farm, to the feed, to even the price of beef itself.
But these subsidies aren’t doing much to keep the price of beef down.
Absolutely, this study from Berkeley from 2014 said beef should be $30 / lb, without subsidies. Inflation-adjusted (with caveats), it’d be ~$40 / lb today.
The problem is this doesn’t really stack up if your eating a lot of stuff thats been put on reduction. Full price meat is really expensive but 90% off meat works out cheaper than vegetables on a per calorie basis. (Vegetables never go on reduction)
At my place meat rarely goes for above 50% or even 30% discounts. And even then, 500g of meat usually costs me in the 150czk range, with 50% off that’s still a solid 75czk, meanwhile my soy strip bag costs up yo 30czk max. Like I wish we had 90% discounts on meat lol xD
As for veggies, some like potatoes, carrots and lettuce are dirt cheap already and you’re not putting the whole thing into a single dish. Shit is like rice, the 5kg bag is almost cheaper than meat, and it’ll last for MANY dishes.
Oh potatoes and rice go in more than half of what I eat, a lot of cababge too. My point is less about meat specifically and more that based on where you live a vegan diet may or may not be the more affordable option. A lot of us just end up on the ‘whatevers on sale’ diet.
I can’t speak for restaurants, but I can speak for vegan replacements for non vegan foods(e.g. Vegan cheese). Its simply, more expensive, because people are willing to pay dor it and RhE company can make more money with it.
At least where I live chicken (frozen) & dairy are some of the cheapest sources of protein, followed closely by beans & similar legumes.
Right!
Every person pays $49 dollar a year on average in Canada towards the $2 billion animal agriculture gets in subsidies.
I’ve been saving so much money since I made the switch. I’m in huge debit so I really need it. I’m also taking home all the salads people bring to potlucks that no one else will eat. One of the family sized salads last me a week. I’ll be pooping green, but eating free.
Ironically, as a toddler, my mom tried offering a fair bit of money (for the time for a toddler, so probably like $20 or $100) to try to get me to eat meat and I still refused. Taste, texture, smell or presentation was icky so nty. Weird people pay extra for it.
for a toddler, so probably like $20 or $100
Mate what the shit
Was gonna say, I remember when I though 5 bucks was a lot, and I was probably like 8 or 10.
Meat always tasted gross to me.
I grimaced every-time as a kid as I ate chicken nuggets because there were weird bits inside of them.
But now with vegan nuggets, I don’t find those weird bits anymore.
Taste, texture, smell or presentation was icky so nty.
Side note, but I think that’s a huge part of the disconnect between vegans and meat-eaters. A lot of vegans for whatever reason just never liked meat in the first place, so they think it’s the easiest thing in the world to give it up and are genuinely baffled why people keep eating meat.
Nah this is just cope. Vegans come from all walks of life.
Ease of doing something or degree of missing it doesn’t really tip the moral scales much when compared to the yawning abyss of horror that is farming. Plenty of us loved all the hedonistic pleasures of carnism, just once you realise what you’re doing it’s completely indefensible and change is required.
Its crazy how far 20 dollars in veggies will go. A bag of carrots is like 2 bucks
Not where I’m at :(
The problem is that fresh food is more expensive than frozen food, but meat freezes better than vegetables. There’s some veggies that can be flash-frozen and retain some taste and texture, but often the comparison is between fresh veggies and frozen meat, and they’re about the same price around here at least.
How much is Tofu? Thats always a good cheap option if fresh veg isnt affordable
I’ve only ever been able to make enjoyable tofu in curries. Got any good recipes?
Buy the super firm stuff and, if you’re willing to spend the extra time, put it in a tofu press to get out even more water. Marinate in the same kind of things as meat. Fry in a pan, cook on the grill, or on an open flame is my favorite :)
The drier the tofu, the more meaty it gets and will brown a lot better too. I don’t care what people say about oil, I think its much better for flavor and Browning.
Freezing the tofu makes it more tougher, and you can use the cheaper tofu’s.
Thats true I forgot about that
i’ve had the opposite experience. Vegan substitutes here for example are wayy more expensive than the meat counterparts, or they’re straight up trash. And cooking anything nutritious enough is by itself expensive enough, irregardless if its meat or vegan
“Meat substitutes,” ie impossible burgers and vegan cheese, are more expensive. There’s a complex process and decades of trial and error that have gone into trying to replicate specific flavors. But “things in place of meat,” like tofu or beans (dried beans especially), are often cheaper.
Nutritious meals based on lentils/legumes are astonishingly cheap. wtf are you smoking? mock sausage etc is a luxury good, it is not a standard feature in any diet.
Overhead, really. The margins on restaurants are knife-edge thin already. Most of the cost of a meal goes to wages, rent, utilities and then the tiny sliver left over goes to ingredients and profit. Any savings from cooking all veg meals is thus completely absorbed by the losses from having such a smaller market, thus prices have to go up to make up the shortfall. It helps that most people are willing to shell out a little more to support their principles, though the cost is why you never see vegan restaurants in poor areas - people can’t afford the fee to eat morally.
capitalism: it sucks!
Jamaica with its 30 vegan restaurants proves your point wrong.
It is actually in fact 30% cheaper to source a whole foods plant-based diet
Source: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
Sorry but… no, my point absolutely stands. I’m just pulling my data from HappyCow and TripAdvisor, but Jamaica has way more than thirty vegan restaurants. 141 that have enough of an internet presence that I can find them before this hangover forced me to stop looking. Happycow has an extremely convenient breakdown by area, too, which shows the regional concentration of veggie/vegan restaurants. And, if you do the math, ~90% of them are in high population density coastal towns with heavily tourism-dependent economies, which is what I’d expect to find (I didn’t control for the obvious potential sampling bias, but it’s a small enough country we can probably assume we’re working with a population here). “Specialty” restaurants, which category unfortunately vegan/veggie venues fall into in the western meme, are even more at risk of failing than the average due to the restricted market appeal, and so require a larger population (and economic base) to support them.
I feel like my comment has touched a nerve with people due to my own inelegance while stating my point. I’m not saying that eating morally has a fee associated with it, I’m well aware of how much cheaper it can be to eat a veggie-heavy or full vegan diet. I am saying that dining out has fees associated with it, and that the cost of dining out has very little to do with the price of the ingredients (even for perceived ‘luxury’ meals like in steakhouses or hotpot) and almost everything to do with the operational overhead of running a restaurant (wages, facilities, utilities). Vegetarian dishes at mixed meat/veggie locations are a ‘money maker’ for the restaurant, because those dishes can be priced similarly to more-expensive ones but cost less to produce. But even that expanded profit margin is always going to be a much smaller percentage than the base cost of the meal, which is defined by the aforesaid overhead.
I’m quite sorry that I didn’t make that clearer in my initial drunken 3am comment!
Happycow breakdown
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