So I shop around to get some bits and pieces for a good home made meal, and I notice some items say, a pack of vegan burgers, these are more expensive than regular burgers!
I’m not a vegan but I’m curious as to why these items are priced as such, it’s a bit of a pain for people who can only eat gluten free food as those items are priced high too. The bread we get for me grandpapa is pricey for what you get.
Is it different production methods that make it pricey? You’d think with healthier, easier to get ingredients would be cheaper than producing regular non vegan items.
Lower volume of sales makes the niche supply lines more expensive to maintain
Less competition means more premium prices until a competitor gets attracted to the market
As a long time vegetarian this is exactly what I noticed in the last years. 15 years ago it was almost impossible to get good vegetarian products in the supermarket. I’m talking about something like a vegetable spread, tofu sausages weren’t a thing. Over the years there were more and more competitors and now the spreads are cheap (cheap as in fucking expensive like everything else).
This was also true for Tofu etc. It started with super niche ecological brands, now there are cheap no name products available. This is what will finally also happen to the fancy burger patties that are on the market for some years now.
But you can be sure everyone in the chain will make their margin on the way except for you.
Edit: Beware US citizen, I am speaking for my home country which is Germany.
It’s worth noting that vegan and gluten free foods are not more expensive… Substitute foods are
which is what most people need to transition to a vegan diet without having to spend a massive amount of time and energy to relearn how to cook.
i’m really not a fan of this semi-elitism that goes “just eat beans and rice!!”, living on only that is utterly fucking depressing and that should be obvious.
For gluten free products: the whole production chain needs to use different tools or be sealed off from the rest. You can generally use the same mill, kneader, oven, tray for barley, wheat, rye, etc without meticulous cleaning in between. But if you want it to be gluten free you now need to either do that expensive cleaning or more realistically have an entirely separate set of machinery and ensure it never gets in contact with your main line.
Meat and dairy are subsidized so that consumers pay below market value for those products, the market is not fair and it’s not free either.
That’s why.
All of agriculture is subsidized. American consumers don’t pay a fair price for anything that’s grown in the US. We don’t pay a fair price for the labor used to pick fruit and harvest the fields, because the farmers use undocumented migrants that are paid below minimum wage.
Do you think we’d be putting corn in our gas tanks if that shit wasn’t subsidized up the ass?
You’d think with healthier, easier to get ingredients would be cheaper than producing regular non vegan items.
Where do you get the idea the ingredients would be healthier or cheaper? Have you ever read the ingredient list of a typical vegan food item? They are some of the highest processed foods the industry can provide, with long lists of chemical additives to make a vegan food item resemble … food. In the US, they even use food colorings for that stuff that are illegal for ages in other parts of the world.
Take that vegan burger, for example. It typically starts with TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein), already highly processed stuff made from soy beans, wheat, or peas. And it gets downhill from there. Watch this guy and learn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ND4lUi-i2s - if you cannot make sense of his German, just skip to 4:36 where he shows what kind of chemicals one needs to make a “vegan burger patty”.
Though red meat isn’t healty either. Same for salted meat. I’m not sure how it compares to highly processed food. You might be better off with that… But we’re comparing two things here that both aren’t ideal. Ultimately you’d be better off eating neither of them.
What makes you think that processing food through an animal is healthier than through a factory?
You have to compare the actual nutrients contained in the product to draw any conclusion about health effects, and the macros are fairly similar for the plant-based versions compared to a given meat product.
The average person (in developed countries) eats significantly more meat than the recommended upper limit by nutrition organizations.
If you just go by the naturalistic argument, you’d conclude that processed drinking water is worse than untreated water, and that vaccines are worse than “perfectly natural” diseases. It’s a common logical fallacy.
