I often see people say things like it is cheaper to follow a vegan diet than an omnivorous one.
I think that this is trivially false (but probably not very interesting), the set of omnivorous diet includes the set of vegan meals and even if the vegan meals are often cheaper than the nonvegan ones, in my personal experience I often find that I am regularly in situations where it would be cheaper to consume a meal that contains meat or dairy (e.g. at restaurants where most meals and not vegan, or when looking around the reduced section of the supermarket).
The common response I get to this is ‘well if you are optimising for the cheapest possible meal (and not just the cheapest meal at say a restaurant) this will probably be something like rice and beans which is vegan’. I somewhat agree here, but I think that it is more useful to say for some level of satisfaction how is expensive is the cheapest possible meal and it is vegan? I think often once we move to things a little more expensive than rice and beans it becomes much less clear whether vegan diets are usually cheaper.
Also if vegan diets were cheaper for similar levels of satisfaction I think I’d expect vegan food to be much more popular amongst people who are not sympathetic to animal ethics/environmental arguments just because I expect consumer preferences to be pretty sensitive to differences in the cost of similar utility goods.
On the general point, as a recently-turned vegan (~1 yr), my spending is roughly the same. Money saved on not buying meat/milk/cheese was basically directly replaced by splurging on expensive stuff like avocados, cashews, faux-cheeses, and fancy salads. All of those are non-essential, but budget wasn’t ever my primary motive in choosing foods.
The following thoughts are mostly in response to your last claim around market dynamics and the foods people choose.
A big part of the observed frequency of meat eating is explained by cultural inertia, esp. with the historical signaling function of meat-eating. For a long long time (and still in rural/poor places) owning animals was a primary store of wealth, and killing them to eat them was a very costly display of your fitness. That kind of signal can be culturally baked-in to various food traditions. Fancy restaurants still play this game, with most of the fanciest and most expensive foods being unusual preparations of hard to acquire or raise meat.
Another enormous factor here is subsidies (something like $40b annually in the US subsidize meat & dairy). Meat is sometimes cheaper or comparable in price to replacement vegan foods, but that’s not a market outcome. Without those subsidies you’d see a bigger price differential.
It’s also note-worthy that, proportionally, many meals with meat have mostly vegan ingredients. Things like steak are outliers, and many meals that contain meat aren’t mostly meat.
I often see people say things like it is cheaper to follow a vegan diet than an omnivorous one.
I think that this is trivially false (but probably not very interesting), the set of omnivorous diet includes the set of vegan meals and even if the vegan meals are often cheaper than the nonvegan ones, in my personal experience I often find that I am regularly in situations where it would be cheaper to consume a meal that contains meat or dairy (e.g. at restaurants where most meals and not vegan, or when looking around the reduced section of the supermarket).
The common response I get to this is ‘well if you are optimising for the cheapest possible meal (and not just the cheapest meal at say a restaurant) this will probably be something like rice and beans which is vegan’. I somewhat agree here, but I think that it is more useful to say for some level of satisfaction how is expensive is the cheapest possible meal and it is vegan? I think often once we move to things a little more expensive than rice and beans it becomes much less clear whether vegan diets are usually cheaper.
Also if vegan diets were cheaper for similar levels of satisfaction I think I’d expect vegan food to be much more popular amongst people who are not sympathetic to animal ethics/environmental arguments just because I expect consumer preferences to be pretty sensitive to differences in the cost of similar utility goods.
On the general point, as a recently-turned vegan (~1 yr), my spending is roughly the same. Money saved on not buying meat/milk/cheese was basically directly replaced by splurging on expensive stuff like avocados, cashews, faux-cheeses, and fancy salads. All of those are non-essential, but budget wasn’t ever my primary motive in choosing foods.
The following thoughts are mostly in response to your last claim around market dynamics and the foods people choose.
A big part of the observed frequency of meat eating is explained by cultural inertia, esp. with the historical signaling function of meat-eating. For a long long time (and still in rural/poor places) owning animals was a primary store of wealth, and killing them to eat them was a very costly display of your fitness. That kind of signal can be culturally baked-in to various food traditions. Fancy restaurants still play this game, with most of the fanciest and most expensive foods being unusual preparations of hard to acquire or raise meat.
Another enormous factor here is subsidies (something like $40b annually in the US subsidize meat & dairy). Meat is sometimes cheaper or comparable in price to replacement vegan foods, but that’s not a market outcome. Without those subsidies you’d see a bigger price differential.
It’s also note-worthy that, proportionally, many meals with meat have mostly vegan ingredients. Things like steak are outliers, and many meals that contain meat aren’t mostly meat.