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.
It’s worth noting that vegan and gluten free foods are not more expensive… Substitute foods are
Beans and rice are pretty cheap by the bag. It’s all about marketing.
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.
It’s not elitism… It just costs more to turn food into something it isn’t than it does to turn it into something it is.
If I wanted to make a bag of beefroccoli to help vegans transition into eating meat, it would cost a fortune!
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”.
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.
The supermarket does not care how it was made.
Vegan is a feature, so they want to make you pay extra for it.
Adding to all of this: the meat and dairy industry are heavily subsidised in the US and many european countries, meaning the government pays a lot to keep the cost of the products down.
At one time vegan shoes were cheap. And suddenly, everywhere the non-leather shoes disappeared and vegan shoes popped up and were advertised at ridiculous prices. They just changed the wording and adjusted the prices. It’s just a marketing tactic and one they use often for whatever stuff you can buy. It’s not so much that people are willing to pay. It’s just that vegan friendly, decently quality at decent prices are very hard to find now. At least here in the european country where i live.
Vegan =/= health, salted fries, palm oil and ketchup is all vegan and I doubt you think of it as healthy.
But anyways, only reason healthy food would be cheaper than non healthy one is if there’s taxes on the non healthy stuff. Non healthy stuff is sold because it’s cheaper or tastier. If they can add the healthy label to sell more they will.
Have a friend that did a masters in psychology which paper was about Biological food. Anything you see with that label gets a price hike. Rarely the on the actual products tested there were feasible differences because biological isn’t a well defined concept.
Father of a friend plants biological tomatoes for himself. For his peers, you just need to not add chemicals and treat that plant biologically. He however only accepted produce as biological if the seeds came from a platelet treated as such, so his biological stuff is second generation onwards.
Since the concept isn’t clearly defined, it’s bs and companies use whatever they can to make a buck.
Because they can
I was thinking something similar too:
Why almond/soy milk is more expensivs than cow milk? To make almond/soy milk you just need to maintain the plants. To make cow milk you need to have cow food, take care of the cow etc. and generally it seems much more inefficient than making plant-based milk. I dont know if they use the whole almond/soy etc to make the milk or only part of them, but still.
On this wikipedia article, under Nutrition and Sustainability, you can see for example that while Soy and oat milks have around half (almond has around ¼) the calories of cow milk (plant based milks seem to be healthier too, due to lower saturated fats and sugar contents), they are much more efficient to produce. Like, oat milk seems to be around 6-7 times more efficient to produce than cow milk which counters the fact that it may have half the calories.
Some may consider cow milk as byproduct of the meat industry, but since baby cows need to feed from it and cows already spend energy to make it, I dont think of it that much as byproduct, it’s necessary.
As someone people said though, it probably is due to the financial incentives given to the cow milk industry🤷
Its subsidies that keep it cheep. Producing beef doesn’t provide free milk. Typically different varieties of cattle are used for dairy and beef. But dairy cows may end up in low grade beef - except when they are put to pasture after their useful life and given a year to rest (this beef is more expensive).
A large part of food cost is processing.
A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.
A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.
Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.
The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.
Burgers (at least supermarket ones) are made from offcuts and other bits that can’t be sold as expensive cuts of meat, so are essentially a byproduct. Pretty much the same for milk. Vegan products usually have to bear the entire cost of production in their price.
You have to pay to have morals in a capitalist society.
Not everything is about new ways that capitalism can be painted as evil. There are valid reasons for why gluten free products are pricier, all of which have been presented in this thread.
Price is set at what the market will pay.
Because the know the people that buy it either are stupid or have no choice (in the cases of the few that actually have to eat those kinds of diets for health reasons).
Yeah. Healthy food is expensive to make, maintain and transport. It’s a luxury in our current state.
beans and onions are famously difficult to grow and transport, yes.
we live in a time where with the magic of freezers we can literally make bags of mostly nutritionally complete food that can be kept frozen for at least a year without any loss of quality, and then you can just toss that in a frying pan when you want to eat it. Healthy food isn’t a luxury, it’s quite cheap and easy and everyone would have access to it if it weren’t for a small amount of abjectly evil people actively preventing it.
Frozen food is less nutritious than fresh food. And maintaining it frozen at the required level needed to maintain the minimum of nutrition is expensive, both during distribution and storage. If the company even bothers to respect that.
By the time those frozen veggies reach your freezer for you to keep them up to a year, their nutritional value might be so low you’d be better off eating cardboard.
Adbot please! Scientists can’t figure out how to keep ice crystals from fucking shit up at the genetic level in industry-specific cryogenic pods and you expect me to believe a Walmart level freezer can keep food fresh and unspoiled after they imported it from halfway across the world?
Just… go away.
for the record, all of this is utter and complete nonsense and you are out of your mind, just so no one reads this and takes it seriously.
Modern flash freezing is basically magic that suspends time, you lose maybe 1% of nutrients and even extremely fragile stuff like berries don’t lose much quality so long as you don’t thaw and re-freeze them.
here’s an article from the USDA explicitly stating that freezing doesn’t destroy nutrients.
Lies! It’s all lies! Don’t believe the magic-touting adbot! They’re just a freezer shill!
My mistake about nutrients in frozen fresh food. Everything else though, just your average adbot lies.
genuine question: are you okay? you kinda give off paranoid delusion vibes
genuine answer: oh yeah, I’m fine. Thanks. I was going for that approach. Glad to see it worked.
