
Is It Cheaper to Be Vegan, Vegetarian, or a Meat Eater? - jaybol
http://www.good.is/post/is-it-cheaper-to-be-vegan-vegetarian-or-a-meat-eater/
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_delirium
This seems like it depends heavily on what kind of vegan diet you live on. A
diet heavy in fresh fruits/vegetables is much more expensive than one
consisting mainly of rice and beans, and you can get wildly different per-day
cost estimates depending on how you tweak the ratios.

The choices in all the columns here seem pretty arbitrary, too. Are they
nutritionally equivalent? Where are those prices from? Etc. Not saying that I
disagree overall, but this ad-hoc comparison doesn't give me any evidence
either way. For example, if I wanted to eat cheaper on the meat side, I'd just
replace that $7.30 chicken fajita with $5 worth of tacos ($3 for a lb of
ground beef, $0.50 for some tortillas, $1.50 for cheese/etc.).

~~~
dwiel
Yeah, these numbers are totally arbitrary. Just in breakfast, they have the
pescetarian eating a $0.50 bagel and the vegetarian eating $1.60 of yogurt and
blueberries ... The vegetarian could just as easily eat the same bagel (with a
cheaper than salmon cream cheese), or better yet, the same eggs that the
omnivore is eating.

I had no idea that there was even an argument that eating meat was cheap.
Eating meat in many places is a sign of wealth which has only recently been
made available.

~~~
alanh
> _I had no idea that there was even an argument that eating meat was cheap._

In _Food, Inc._ , the case is made that it’s far cheaper (and easier, and more
psychologically desirable) to get a 99¢ drive-thru burger than fresh
vegetables. This is believed to be a significant cause of obesity (childhood
and otherwise), especially in the lower classes.

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reasonattlm
If you're Joe Average, a sizable fraction of your lifetime expense is medical
and opportunity costs incurred in the last decades of your life.

Veganism and vegetarianism appear to at least somewhat reduce methionine
intake, and therefore act like mild calorie restriction mimetics. Ergo they
also somewhat reduce late life expenditure on medicine, and reduce the
opportunity cost burden of frailty and chronic sickness:

[http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4015)

<http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm>

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mikeklaas
This is just silly:

\- meat eaters generally don't eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every day

\- pescetarian's sandwich somehow crazily cheap compared to others

\- pescetarian dinner has two salads; vegan's dinner is a strict subset of the
vegetarian. The calorie count should be the same, at the very least

~~~
davidj
really? I eat 2 eggs, 2 bacon every day. hmm.

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amadiver
I'm really surprised this is article is being upvoted. It's a recap of another
article from another site, and the sample diet for each category is totally
arbitrary. It might be a good topic for discussion, but by itself is wholly
lacking in content.

Are people voting for the pretty graphic?

~~~
nathanielksmith
I agree; the article is fluff. I upvoted for the discussion.

My partner and I are vegan and it has long been our experience that it's a
cheaper way to live, especially given that vegan staples like grains / legumes
can be bought in bulk at low prices.

The way I think about it is that meat eaters tend to eat herbivores, meaning
that if you're buying meat you're paying for both the production of plant life
to feed some animal as well as the cost of raising / slaughtering / packaging
that animal. A plant-based diet will always be less expensive as you are just
eating the plant material that would otherwise be fed to a cow, pig, or
whomever (a simplification, but a helpful one, I think).

Where it _does_ get expensive is with processed cheese/meat alternatives (eg,
Daiya and Gardein). My gut feeling is, though, that purchasing these
occasionally would at most make our budget match (not exceed) that of a meat
eater's.

In the end, saving money is one of the many, many reasons we are vegan.

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abeppu
This article seems to be written taking as a premise that "conventional
wisdom" holds vegetarian and vegan diets to be more expensive than the
standard western omnivorous diet. To me, this seems ridiculous; it should be
obvious to most people that a vegetarian or vegan diet would be less expensive
from readily available information:

(a) when you go to the grocery store, on a per pound or per serving basis,
meat tends to be more expensive than in season vegetables or fruits (or
grains, beans, etc.)

(b) rich countries consume more meat than poor countries, and as their
economies grow or shrink they change their meat consumption (for example, look
at China in recent years or the US over the past century)

(c) a junior high knowledge of life sciences and trophic levels (remember the
10% rule?) should make it clear why eating animals that we raise on our own
agricultural output (e.g. corn, soy, other grains) would be drastically less
efficient/more costly than just eating those crops ourselves.

What _should_ be surprising is that this sample only finds the vegan diet to
be less than 25% cheaper than the omnivorous diet. Admittedly, the omnivore on
the sample day didn't eat any beef, or large cuts of meat, but still, I would
have thought that the vegetarian and vegan options would have been cheaper. I
guess really this is a demonstration of the degree to which meat production is
subsidized.

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tgriesser
It'd be interesting if someone took studies on the health benefits to each of
these categories and calculated both the direct and indirect costs of
belonging to each of these groups.

Although it would be more controversial since the number of factors associated
with health cannot be reduced to food choice, it would make for an interesting
argument either way.

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tuppy
The vegan and vegetarian sections made me cringe, not nearly enough protein.
They neglected to include the cost of supplements that you need to take if you
plan on being a vegan or vegetarian while maintaining an active lifestyle.

Also, it likely matters what's in season and what is available cheaply in your
locale. Someone near the coasts is going to have access to much cheaper
seafood than someone in the Rockies and Plains. If you have access to markets
where you can buy directly from fishers, farmers, or butchers you can usually
see a pretty significant cost savings.

I am very curious where they found a $0.25 serving of salmon and cheese for
the pescetarian breakfast. A serving size of smoked salmon is usually 1/2 -
1/4 of a package that goes for 5 or more dollars in the grocers in my area.
Some of the other prices were questionable as well ($7.30 for a fish/chicken
fajita??).

~~~
davidj
Yes, even when you consider that I can buy $1 8oz Chinese Franken Salmon at
the Doller Tree, a 1/4 serving would be $.25 and 1/2 would be $.50 and thats
not even including the cheese.

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Yaggo
I'm a vegan and it ain't cheap. Although nowadays you can buy most vegan stuff
from regular supermarket, they are still kind of marginal products and priced
accordingly. E.g. soya milk costs more than 2 €/L, while cow-milk is less than
1 euro (IIRC). This is in Finland, Europe.

The funny part is, that most of soya produced worldwide is used to feed the
livestock, i.e. converted to meat at pretty bad efficiency rate. So, soya per
se is not expensive, and I'm pretty sure soya products could be cheaper than
their animal-based counterparts, if produced on a (comparable) mass-scale.

(Then again, the "cheap" concept used here assumes that the suffering of
animals has no price, which is not true for most vegans/vegetarians.)

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Xodarap
It would be better to compare direct substitutes, like tvp vs. ground beef.

The first google results find $3.50/lb for tvp and $6.50/lb ground beef
([http://www.nutsonline.com/cookingbaking/beans/soybeans/prote...](http://www.nutsonline.com/cookingbaking/beans/soybeans/protein-
gluten-free.html?utm_source=googlebase) and [http://www.amazon.com/Omaha-
Steaks-pkgs-Premium-Ground/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Omaha-Steaks-pkgs-
Premium-Ground/dp/B002ZNFHJ4) respectively).

So the conclusion might be true, despite an invalid argument.

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jfb
It would be interesting to see someone try to price externalities into this
sort of comparison, although almost certainly the result would be as expected
(veganism in a walk) and like all such projections, would be wildly
subjective.

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esponapule
better to pay the grocer now than the doctor later... a vegan diet will save
you later in life

