Is It Cheaper to Be Vegan, Vegetarian, or a Meat Eater? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Cheaper to Be Vegan, Vegetarian, or a Meat Eater?

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12 pointsjaybol17 comments

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.).

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.

> 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.

Totally, there's a wide variance in cost of vegan diets, as is also true of vegetarian and omnivore diets, and that might be substantially wider than the cost differences between these categories. The cost of my vegetarian diet now is a lot higher than it was when I was a poor college student at my vegetarian co-op.

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/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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??).

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.

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.)

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... and http://www.amazon.com/Omaha-Steaks-pkgs-Premium-Ground/dp/B0... respectively).

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

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.

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

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