I thought the MAGA clowns were going to import Argentinian beef to lower the prices in the USA? Oh the fuck well. Zero sympathy, you voted for the BS.
MAGA importing beef… to the UK?
You mean donkeys?
only 29% more expensive is still criminally cheap for meat prices. meat and dairy subsidies have made a western world where i typically need to pay the same or more for a vegggie burger than a meat one.
29% should be more like 70%.
If the meatless option is 29% cheaper, the meat option is .29/(1-.29) = 41% more expensive, not 29%. Meatballs in the article are .41/(1-.41) = 69% more expensive than plantballs, which is close to your target number.
I remember the days when a veggie cheeseburger was a grilled cheese sandwich. Progress.
this math hurt my head, but i thank you
Never too late to get better at anything. I’ll give it my best shot, but if it still doesn’t make sense, ask an LLM to explain anything that doesn’t make sense, and keep digging, and you’ll know it inside and out.
Basically, if the price was p currency units and is now 29% off, the price is now p-.29p = (1-.29)p currency units (by the distributive property). The old price is .29p currency units higher than the new price, and as a fraction of the new price, that is .29p/[(1-.29)p] higher. The p’s cancel out, so this fraction does not depend on the starting price. Write that fraction as a percent (per 100), and you get your answer.
It’s not obvious when looking at it. Numbers can be inconvenient.
Don’t forget the cross subsidies from co-products.
If ground beef (aka beef mince in the UK where this story is running) is the cheapest trimmings that remain after all of the expensive cuts have been processed, it’s entirely possible that the low price for this byproduct is partially subsidized by the high prices for the premium product (expensive steaks, moderate expense whole cuts). Plus things like hides for leather.
For now, the plant-based competition is aiming at the types of meat that are easier to mimic or replace with plant-based foods. And unfortunately, those happen to be the cheaper types of meat. If we get to the point where there is significant plant-based competition to filet mignon, that product will have a lot more room to work with in being price competitive.
Pricing inputs get complicated, and government subsidies are only a piece of the picture.
what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said. im posing that without the heavy subsidies, we would see a more accurate consumer pricing, that remains true. of course there are other factors involved, that goes without saying.
what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said.
Not every reply to a comment is intended to do that.
well forgive me, but it seemed like there was a tone of correction happening, my bad.
Same with alcohol-free beer and other drinks. Somehow they always cost considerably more than regular ones.
They don’t make the drink and then pour in rubbing alcohol at the end.
Non-alcoholic versions of drinks cost at least as much to produce (many cost more because they’re removing the alcohol at the end of the process), and they’re way less popular, so the economies of scale makes the alcoholic versions cheaper per unit.
thing with that is that they actually have to produce those drinks normally and then remove the alcohol, so the process is actually more expensive and labor intensive. at least thats what i heard on the radio one day, im no expert.
You have to feed the yeast enough to make the beer which gets at least a few percent alcohol, otherwise you’d just have porridge.
meat and dairy subsidies
That has been proven to be incorrect: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/meat-subsidies
Removing the subsidies would rise the prices by cents.
Raw food - any food - is dirt cheap. Most of the costs is the chain of logistics (and that every middleman takes their cut).
What’s the carbon footprint of BM? I remember being told it was very high, but hard to find numbers.
Not sure what you mean by BM (I assume Beyond Meat?), but every single plant-based food comes out insanely far ahead from animal based foods
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy. https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Fantastic, thank you for the update. And yes I did mean beyond meat. I happen to think it’s super tasty.
I mean beyond meat production process is famously industrial and complex; there’s even South Park episode on it where Cartman agrees to eat it because it’s the same unhealthy factory made slop that he’s used to.
Now, for the beyond meat oil use. They apparently dropped refined coconut and canola oil in favour of avocado oil. And oh boy, avocado oil production is almost as bad as if Nestle owned all of it, but at least it should be healthier than coconut/canola mix, right? And then most avocado oil is fraudulent soybean/sunflower/other mixes.
And then there’s also avocado oil deforestation/water use etc.
My points are:
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Beyond Meat is slop; let’s not switch processed cold cuts for a sludge.
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you’re better off (health-wise and climate wise) making different bean patties (chop 'em, freeze 'em, shape 'em, cook 'em) and lowering your red meat intake than switching to beyond meat.
The process around meat is no less industrial either. Whole food plant-based diets come out ahead health wise of course, but the research comparing animal meats to beyond show beyond coming out ahead for health
In terms of environmental effects, processing is not a major factor at all. It’s hardly a minor one either
For most foods — and particularly the largest emitters — most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green) and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers — both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods.
[…]
Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.
No.
She bases that information on LCA. LCAs are bullshit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016724002511
Tldr; they are self reported, aggregate data globally and treats the whole globe uniformly, instead of looking at local qualities; and Beyond Meat conviviently for them does not provide even that data for it’s whole supply chain. That means for example that the total carbon footprint of beef of worst industrial farms is applied across all beef produce, even though industrial farms deliver only about 13% of beef worldwide.
Generally I recommend the linked article, they explain why Beyond Meat and similar are just wasting your time at best, or sinister capitalist trick at worst.
Again, the way forward is:
Whole food plant-based diets
and interim is switching feedlot farming and similar to
Furthermore, framing animals as unilaterally less efficient than plants assumes that neither animal production systems nor meat consumption habits can be pushed in more sustainable directions. However, abundant options to make animal-sourced foods more sustainable could be explored, including agro-pastoral, agro-silvo-pastoral (mixed crop-livestock-forest), and regenerative agriculture systems (Costa et al., 2018).
Almost all global meat production happens in factory farms. Especially in developed countries with the highest meat consumption. I will look at the US for an example:
Currently, ‘grass-finished’ beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.[1] Land animal figures use data from the USDA Census of Agriculture[2] and EPA definitions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.[3]
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates
Even if those other methods could magically do much better, which I significantly doubt given the history of those kinds of methods over promising and under delivering, it does relatively little good to look at any other method because they do not come close to scaling to the level of consumption we’re seeing here. A pasture only system could at most come to a small fraction of production. Using 100% of the land, which would create huge deforestation pressures
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that a lot of people that start on things like beyond and impossible end up eventually switching to much more whole plant-based foods in the end anyways. It allow a lot more easy room to bridge to whole foods than starting with just 100% whole food is for a lot of people
I will look at the US for an example By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows
Cool. As the authors of the study I linked wrote, with sources, global stat is <13%.
Example: dairy, 1 liter of milk requires - depending on the method and location -between 19L of freshwater (section 5.2) to almost 3000L, median 196. In USA it starts at ~700L.
99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are
Interestingly average poultry requires less land than average pulses. And there’s this gem from section 5.2 (again, the linked document has further sources) further explaining why LCA or applying US averages globally is wrong.
As another example, that the lowest 10 percentile footprint dairy farms have lower greenhouse gas equivalent emissions than the 90th percentile soy, nut, and oat farm
Using 100% of the land, which would create huge deforestation pressures
Same study, point 4.1.
which I significantly doubt given the history of those kinds of methods over promising and under delivering
5.1 and 5.3 why Beyond Meat and similar are over promising and under delivering, with already established examples that show that the substitutes did not decrease meat/dairy consumptions but added to the total consumption.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that a lot of people that start on things like beyond and impossible end up eventually switching to much more whole plant-based foods in the end anyways.
Citation needed.
I think this is my last post in the thread (and I guess yours too, we seem to exhaust the topic between us).
To sum it up:
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we agree on whole plant based diet being the goal
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we disagree on the interim diet and how to encourage and enable the transition from current meat-based diets
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A plant should have been way cheaper than meat to begin with. Who do they think they’re fooling?
Meat and dairy are heavily subsidised
I don’t know about your country, but here in Poland “meat subsidies” are targeted at improving animal welfare or insurance (e.g. from avian flu for poultry). I fail to see how it is a problem?
Just of the top of my head here are some possible ideas to explain why not:
- Meat subsidies
- Meat substitutes require more processing and additional ingredients
- Meat sells a lot more than meat substitutes hence the whole chain benefits more from economies of scale
- Animals raised for meat can extract nutrition from plants and parts of plants which humans cannot (for example cattle can actually break up the fiber in food and extract nutrition from it, which humans cannot), plus they can eat plants which are far more hardy than most plants grown for human consumption. Some will also eat other animals which humans do not, such as insects.
I doubt it’s just one of those things that is responsible and suspect it’s a mix of those and maybe more.
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This is correct, however:
You need to also take into account that plants are just the primary ingredients and it needs a lot of intermediary steps during manufacturing.
I say this not to say you’re incorrect but just to be a more complete picture so it’s unassailable
what are you on about? don’t you know it’s far cheaper to grow a bunch of plants and then feed it to an animal for a long period of time while that animal grows and then harvest that animal for a small portion of the calories it consumed?
I can chime in here (I work in plant based meat). It should be but it’s not. Why… Lots of reasons. But basicly it’s split between animal based meat is artificially cheap and plant based meat costs a lot to make. A lot of the costs (for the good brands) are in the flavorings.
It will only be cheap with large economy of scale factories
If it is the same process I saw years ago they extract something from vegetables that is what gives blood its color and taste, and that is the the sauce that make it taste like meat, and that process, I guess, is expensive at least in part because plants have very little of this compound.
Fake meat is expensive because greedy capitalists know they can charge more for it, simple as that.
Tell that to BeyondMeat bag holders. -99.10% return in 5 years, the greedy capitalist pigdogs.
Haha I didn’t know that, that’s sorts funny, rip to them
Or maybe because stupid prols are paying premium and letting themselves get fucked
Agree but if there isn’t another option what else can they do
I think Quorn has been cheaper than meat for ages. But then it doesn’t taste as good, so I stopped buying it years ago.
The Beyond stuff is way more than beef costs. £4 for 250g vs £2.69 for the same amount of meat. And that’s the 5% fat beef as well.
The bolognese sauce costs me more than the meat in any case, not to mention the gargantuan amount of cheese we put on lasagne.
You shouldn’t be paying that much for Bolognese sauce, it is cheap to make and tastes better.
Supermarket brand sauce is like 70p, but it tastes shit. And tbh, the good stuff is 3 quid, and it’s worth paying that over chopping and stirring stuff for an hour.
Bro how expensive are tomatoes in the UK for bolognese to be that much more expensive than the meat to put in it?
This image always upsets me. I really don’t think Ronnie O’Sullivan deserves this treatment. At least not that I know of.
Briefly, Beyond Burger burger patties were cheaper in a (U.S.) Costco than the equivalent Morton’s patties.
It got me to try their v3 forumula… and its actually really good. You have to grill the snot out of it, but it’s good.
Beyond Meat is at the point where carnivores won’t notice unless you point it out to them.
Which is one of the reasons a lot of vegetarians I know don’t like it, it tastes like they remember meat tasting and grosses them out.
Nostalgia is a hell of a thing and it applies to food too. I went veg a few years back and sometimes I want that texture and flavor a cheeseburger provides and beyond or impossible patty hits the mark close enough. I think it really lowers the barriers to entry for that kind of dietary restriction. Now if I could find a good substitute for bacon I’d be in heaven but everything I’ve tried tases like cardboard or like those stale beacon bits.
I think the latter paragraph is too generalized. As a vegan I’m delighted if I find a product that tastes like I remember my favourite meat dishes tasted.
Yeah, no, I refuse to eat anything that has “versions” and my diet is limiting consumption of anything that needs a formula to make. Those are not indicators of food fit for human consumption.
(Before someone calls me names, I’m on plant-based)
When Beyond Beef switched from v2 to the v3 (w/ avocado oil), my wife and I tried it and were like, “THERE IT IS! They finally fucked up a good thing, as predicted…”
But after eating v3 for several months and lucking my way back into a box of v2 at Costco, I can firmly say that v2 was kind of shit.
You just have to season your Beyond Burgers now, is all. You didn’t have to before. At least we never did.
V2 was awful. And so salty it made my skin tingle.
V3 is like night and day.
…impossible still decisively wins as a ground beef analog, but beyond takes the crown for sausage + nuggets in similar fashion…
Agreed on all counts. I had already tried them all as I wanted to favor plant based meat on an ecological basis, but my daughter became a vegetarian so I been methodically trying everything on the market and Impossible is better in the beef-like category for sure.
I tried the Impossible pre-made burgers at home and they tasted like rubber gloves or something, so we haven’t tried them again since. What do you season yours with?
…that sounds like the older beyond burgers, not impossible: are you sure you didn’t get the brands mixed-up?..i season mine just like ground beef; my wife says it’s essentially indistinguishible, as she’s the carnivore in the household…
Not the person you replied to, but I season them exactly as I would any other burger and they come out pretty good. I will note that they are picky in how they are cooked (not the actual ground beef isn’t), but you can’t cook them quite the same. If you overcook them, the texture/taste call off a cliff.
I like cheap and accessible plant-based alternatives. But this doesn’t really sound like that. It’s much closer to “now the poor people have to eat weeds lol”
A distinction without a difference. Let’s subsidize legumes and plant-based products to the same level animal-based parts are subsidized and see which one is cheaper.
The CPI changes the basket of goods all the time, and I’ve long suspected the degradation in food quality keeps hitting a lower bar for food processing and quality, which then gets integrated as the permanent price floor as the money supply grows. Margins become too low on anything but shit tier food.
Beyond isn’t cheap. It’s super expensive. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’ve never really eaten corpses so that’s probably why.
Oh waow much edgy
Like calling regular food “weeds”.
Much like how the use of quotes indicates that I am not referring to myself as laughing at the impoverished, I am not referring to myself as calling plant-based food weeds. It is, if you can believe it, a mockery of the wealthy elite.
Honestly as long as it doesn’t taste weird or have a strange texture I don’t mind plant based meats
Yep
- tell me it’s not meat clearly
- make it taste pretty good
If you do the above 2 things and its 29% cheaper than mince, you best believe I’ll be eyeing up the plant stuff
When burger king launched their plant based whopper, it was legitimately better tasting than their normal beef whopper.
Impossible, at least to me, is functionally indistinguishable from a ground beef patty. Back when I was vegetarian and before I was vegan, I went to Burger King on lunch to try the Impossible Whopper. I wasn’t fond of Burger King, but I was mostly curious enough to see what an Impossible Burger tasted like having had Beyond at home once (where Beyond is pretty easily distinguished from ground beef by its flavor).
Walked in, walked out, took a bite in my car. Straight-up almost went back in and asked for a new one before realizing it wouldn’t do any ethical good and that I didn’t have the time. This was even after seeing that it was in the Impossible-branded wrapper. I decided to go there another time to “try the real one”, and it was the same. I was dumbfounded; it was straight-up just a Whopper – having admittedly not eaten a BK burger in a few years at that point. (They also put mayo on it by default without telling you, so good job, BK.)
You kind of know after when you don’t feel as slow or whatever
I feel like the thing is you can hide so much in something like a burger between sauces and other toppings and stuff that it’s really the texture and protein that’s doing the heavy lifting. Which by the way is no bad thing, if I can’t tell the difference anyway then awesome.
I’m sure we’re quite a lot further away from having a “naked” cut of meat with minimal seasoning tasting like the real deal, but that also doesn’t really matter either. I eat a handful of steaks a year and I probably won’t have a veggie steak any time soon, but if 6-8 steaks a year is the only meat I’m still eating in a few years that’s a huge step in the right direction
I had the same experience. I couldn’t tell the difference at all. Wondered if a mistake had been made, but had the same experience the next time. And I’ve had enough people tell me that they can’t tell the difference.
This company did not become gigantic for no reason!
This is actually why I prefer the Beyond to Impossible. Both command a premium, and the Impossible is so indistinguishable that it feels like a waste of money. The Beyond has a great taste, but is not exactly beef flavor. They smell like cat food to me before they’re cooked, but I find myself craving the taste now and again because it is something unique.
Yeah, that’s super fair. Both have a place. Beyond is something different as a novelty if you already eat meat; I’d liken it to a non-vegan using agave over honey. For vegetarians/vegans, it’s nice to have basically a 1:1 if you want it. Even for vegans and vegetarians, it’s valid to prefer Beyond over that 1:1 replica. And for non-vegetarians trying to be more climate-conscious or a bit less unhealthy (Impossible is far from healthy – its saturated fat content, for example, is nearly as bad as ground beef’s – but it’s also less likely to give you colorectal etc. cancer), it’s a reasonable choice.
There is absolutely a place for both products. Impossible did exactly what they set out to do in flavor and texture mimicry. It’s the one I tried first as a meat eater and that’s what got me to try Beyond and a few others.
I hear the complaints about the fat and sodium in the products, and while it sounds less than ideal due a vegan or vegetarian diet, it doesn’t sound that bad for an omnivore, especially one that eats less veg. The great thing about them being a manufactured product is both of those things can change through product development. I remember reading that Impossible went through numerous revisions to stand up to Burger King’s conveyor belt grill system.
I’m very excited for the future of these types of products.
The greatly increased sodium content is a concern for my household, though.
Those are older recipes. Always read the ingredients tho.
370 mg per 113 g serving, specifically described as the current recipe from their own site:
That’s about 5× as much sodium as beef.
Oh yeah I should probably watch out for that too
Totally. I’m hoping they can get it real close and less expense. Then start the swap out
Same. I tried a Burger King when they had a deal where you could get the regular Whopper and the Beyond (or whatever brand it was, of plant-based meat) Whopper for the price of one, so I figured, taste test. The regular Whopper is your typical trashy fast food burger that is on the better side of decent, without being good. The mayonnaise and ketchup are a bit strong, but between the lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles, it’s a well balanced sandwich. I’d like the burger to be thicker, but this is what’s keeping it from being a good burger. So then the Beyond one. It tastes burnt, like the most important flavour to emulate was the “char-broiled” feature. Beyond the burnt flavour, it just tastes… bland. They could have seasoned it better, maybe.
I want to believe in plant-based. Not because I want to be a vegan. But because IDGAF about whether it’s animal-based or plant-based. I don’t think most people should. I have a unique condition (bariatric surgery) where I actually need animal protein. So vegan stuff can’t be my main thing, but I can have some of it. But for people who don’t actually need animal protein? I wanna see that stuff succeed so much.
Edit: Someone actually beat me to it, and the plant-meat BK uses is Impossible, not Beyond. Still, I disagree with that person — there was a pretty big difference between the two. Maybe Impossible has gotten better over the years?
I don’t really see the point in them though. Why would I buy plant meat to make a not chicken wrap when I could just make a mixed bean wrap.
Some people prefer the meat taste, not a bean taste
Variety.
Like so much else, it seems to be a useful innovation predicated on a certain degree of professionalized cultivation and expert engineering. I predict I’m going to enjoy the loss-leading rollout and hate the post-market-saturation enshittification.
lol fucking where??? Im in a major city in Canada and a lb of beyond or impossible is like $10+ An impossible whopper has come down in price but it’s still more expensive than a regular. Thats always been the issue with plant based beef, even though it’s made of soy, it costs me double what beef does, so I don’t blame poor people avoiding it
In Tesco apparently.
it doesnt cost double, youre just being charged double. the prices only make sense due to the colossal subsidies from the animal agriculture lobbies
I predicted this a few years ago while at the same time saying “I hope I am being a pessimist”. I really didn’t want this to be how plant based meat alternatives became more popular.
Genuinely I might end up going vegan for mostly financial reasons
There’s some good vegan recipe communities here on lemmy if you want some inspiration
Thanccs :3
And 90% of them tend to be shit that tastes or looks good.
I have some ugly, tasteless tofu ready instead. Now to figure out how to season it to make it edible without overdosing on it.
And I still had to include 4 eggs. It’s more ethical than eating the animal itself, but still…
Had to reread that like 5 times to realize you were not saying that you thought those were bad recipes
That’s 90% of the problem. People can’t read, get upset, bring on the mob, torches, and pitchforks.
I say shit anyway.
I love vegetarian food but they can pull eggs and dairy from my cold dead hands. I will never give either of those up ever.
Ironically, I hate eggs, unless they are like Pancakes or cakes, I love cheese/milk, but I cannot live without Vitamin B12, and I feel reinforced defeats the point. There’s some unstable ones from microorganisms on certain mushrooms. You can’t predict if it is present or not, which is a problem.
I secretly tried to go full vegan, though I would be open to eating meat and such, I didn’t want to DEPEND on anything that walks, I wanted vegeterian to be the food basis.
I also do thing it is a good practice to practice non-harm (issue with the animals themselves, I do NOT enjoy knowing something has to die or be exploited for me to eat, I do not want to live that way), but I also want to get away with it by using fake meat like Tofu, without doing the whole “I’m vegan you fucking carno-murderhobos!”. I want to pretend to be a carno, I’d also eat roadkill, so long as I don’t depend on it (it is more about resources and safety than purely ethics, ethics too though).
Vegetarian but when I don’t have my kids I’m kinda already there. It’s so good for your heart health as well btw. There’s no where for your fibre intake to go but up. I would suggest talk to a nutritionist though because you will very likely need a supplement or two there are some vitamins/minerals that are just hard to get from vegetable sources at the volume you get from meat.
When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.
Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.
I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.
What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits?
They want to make money by targeting the smaller market of people with more money. It’s marketing strategy, usually tied to “wellness” - which is a super huge market (almost entirely grifters.)
Soybeans as a commodity can be cheap, but that doesnt mean that an end product made out of soybeans will also inherently be cheap.
The market for soybean based meat alternatives is not that huge, so one of the more expensive aspects of trying to have an end product in an actual brick and mortar store is going to be getting space on the shelf in the first place. Packaging design and maybe some marketing, not to mention creating the actual product itself. All that stuff is expensive even if its mostly soybeans that the end product is made from
Laundry detergent is like 95% water, but it costs far more than if it was actually 100% water
Same. I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of. Soy and oat and other grain based replacements for animal products should be dirt cheap. They’re marketing to hipsters and pricing accordingly. So all that shit about the economy and whatnot? Marketing trash. Make that shit cost what it should and way more people would buy it. Especially with everything going up.
I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of
Eh, maybe at the beginning when you haven’t adjusted and are looking for one to one replacements for meat. After a while though you just get used to beans and lentils, which are dirt cheap, and tofu and eat more of those then the fake meat products.
Not sure about soy beans, but you can buy a lot of beans very cheaply. Oats are also very cheap.
Processed foods are always going to cost more, and probably suck. Make your own, meat or vegan it’s going to be better for you, tastier, or both.
You don’t have to buy such products when you are vegan but personally I’d rather be taken advantage of than have non-human animals be taken advantage of and in a much more severe way. People really get thrown off at the slightest inconvenience when it affects them…
Ah yes, the “slight inconvenience” of being poor.
Fair, and expected, but why not both? Why can’t vegan food be profitable and also cheaper than animal-based products? Because of greed taking advantage of people with hearts bigger than their wallets but who will open it regardless and just pay more. The one who is more frugal and doesn’t have as strict of dietary restrictions sees the bullshit on both sides but buys what’s affordable.
I will say this for you vegans… one of you got me curious about oat milk, so I started asking for it at my favourite coffee shop, and I think it makes their coffee better. They push it with new customers, but they serve whole (cow) milk as well. Once I opted for cow milk a couple times, they stopped asking. So I had to mention that I was curious about oat milk. Hoping to push the trend back, where they stop asking me and just do oat milk. I’ll buy oat-based creamer if it’s cheaper/on sale. I want to give it a try at home now. Not because it’s more ethical, but because I found it makes my coffee better.
I like eating meat. I’m not gonna mince words here. But if I found a plant-based alternative I liked and it was cheaper (or comparable), I would get it more, but I have to be careful… because I still need animal protein due to the surgery I got a couple years ago.
Where I live there are little processed vegan options, they are hard to come by/identify, and there are no vegan sections but I’m glad that they are here at all tbh given the state of things. As for prices just like with everything you judge things on a per product basis. If there’s something that costs more than I’m willing to pay I just skip it as I’m not forced to buy certain types of products which are generally not healthy anyway. Not that I disagree about pricing being shitty but you just work with what you have since cruelty is so deeply ingrained in our society it inherently requires effort to minimise it. Just like with privacy for example where you actively need to fight for it. It’s just something you do. Once my current phone is on death bed I will be buying fairphone which is expensive or a similar product out of the same principle.
A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).
There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.
The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.
Seconding the comment on TVP. It’s shelf-stable, cheap, and can take the place of ground meat in anything where it’s there for the texture, not the flavor. I like it in cottage pie, pasta sauce, and mixed into macaroni and cheese.
