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.
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.
biological
I suspect you mean “organic”?
@Nougat@fedia.io
Indeed. My guess is that @AdNecrias@lemmy.pt speaks a germanic language where the English word ‘organic’ translates to ‘biological’
Oh, yes, I meant no shade at all.
Latin one! And in this context in Portuguese, yeah they do translate to that.
But we still see both labels being used, sometimes in the same product. I’m saying label here because I don’t think what companies use the word as and what it actually means aligns.
It means that, but both labels appear in Portuguese here. Orgânico and biológico.
Given your question I assume in English the term has a more biohazardy connotation?
In English, “biological” is a relatively neutral word when used by itself. It just means “of material caused by life.” Organic, in the context of food products, carries the notions of “natural purity” and “without laboratory-made additives/pesticides/fertilizers.”
But, as you say, “organic” doesn’t really mean that, the US guidelines for what qualifies as “organic” are far looser than most people think, and will vary between different kinds of products. Kind of like how “cage free” eggs are not necessarily any more humane, and could arguably be less humane depending on the farm.
I was now informed by my friend that over here the term biological sometimes refers to more a non-gmo nature of the product, and organic the non use of chemicals. It’s still pretty messy with how they used but what she saw defining it tended to that distinction.
Yeah. Healthy food is expensive to make, maintain and transport. It’s a luxury in our current state.
Neither vegan nor gluten free food is “healthier” than other food. It’s a question of scale and target demographic.
Red meat and processed meat are classed as carcinogenic and have plenty of LDL cholesterol. Its not that hard to be healthier than that.
But now you’re cherry picking food. Fish and chicken is good and healthy food, why didn’t you mention those instead. Pure sugar is both vegan and gluten free, but you wouldn’t call that healthy would you?
There is nothing unhealthy about gluten if your body can tolerate it. So vegan, gluten free and the opposite are all perfectly valid options for a healthy diet. You could also have an unhealthy diet within those 3 categories as well.
from the OP
a pack of vegan burgers, these are more expensive than regular burgers!
I don’t think they meant fish burgers when they said regular burgers. And sugar isn’t generally considered a vegan substitute for an animal product.
People with Cron’s or celiac would beg to differ on the gluten free part. But, yes scale and other factors definitely matter
That’s not “healthier” in the general sense, that’s like saying peanuts aren’t healthy because some people have allergies to them.
Gluten isn’t inherently not healthy because a sub set of the population can’t process it correctly.
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
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).
The supermarket does not care how it was made.
Vegan is a feature, so they want to make you pay extra for it.
because fuck you
Economies of scale and subsidies/successful lobbying.
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”.
You’re right for processed veggie stuff, but OP’s statement also works for tofu, seitan or tempeh. It’s usually way more expensive per kg than meat, be it chicken or beef.
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.
Though red meat isn’t healty either. Same for salted meat. I’m not sure how it compares to highly processed food. You might be better off with that… But we’re comparing two things here that both aren’t ideal. Ultimately you’d be better off eating neither of them.
Indeed. If you want to live vegan, do so, and avoid “vegan meat substitutes” of all kinds.
I eat for happiness. You have to die of something and I’m going to die of happiness.
Lower volume of sales makes the niche supply lines more expensive to maintain
Less competition means more premium prices until a competitor gets attracted to the market
As a long time vegetarian this is exactly what I noticed in the last years. 15 years ago it was almost impossible to get good vegetarian products in the supermarket. I’m talking about something like a vegetable spread, tofu sausages weren’t a thing. Over the years there were more and more competitors and now the spreads are cheap (cheap as in fucking expensive like everything else).
This was also true for Tofu etc. It started with super niche ecological brands, now there are cheap no name products available. This is what will finally also happen to the fancy burger patties that are on the market for some years now.
But you can be sure everyone in the chain will make their margin on the way except for you.
Edit: Beware US citizen, I am speaking for my home country which is Germany.
There’s probably also a lot of r&d that still needs to be earned back as opposed to the meat industry which has streamlined everything.
It’s straight up just because people will pay the price they’re asking…
This is contrary to basic economic principles.
If a beef burger and vegan burger cost the same to make, but people will pay more for the vegan, that world attract more vegan producers to the market, and more competition would reduce the price.
That is a very rudimentary understanding of the system that doesn’t always pan out in a particular time frame or due to external factors.
- It takes time for that effect to occur
- It doesn’t take into account barriers to entry, of which there are many for food
- It doesn’t take into account that there are are actually a small number of companies that own the bulk of our food supply chain and it’s in their financial interest to keep prices high for things that are perceived as luxury
It’s not rudimentary, it’s a complex system reduced to a few sentences.
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Vegan patties have been around forever.
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There aren’t significantly more barriers to entry for food products than other industries.
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Yes vendors want high prices, but that applies to any product, not only vegan products.
The answer is, as everyone else has pointed out, economies of scale. There’s a larger market with more participants producing more beef burgers than there are vegan patties.
Economies of scale affects the costs to the manufacturer. Competition/demand affect the price to the consumer.
Correct. That’s precisely why producers of meat patties can still be profitable at a much lower price point.
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“basic economic principles” is handwaving. you’re storytelling, not making a scientific postulate
It’s a lemmy comment.
it’s storytelling, not science
It’s social media, who’s making scientific postulates?
lots of people talk about economics as though it is science.
Yup it is contrary to normal economic principles, read up on luxury goods and in particular veblen goods and how price finding works there.
In the end humans are not at all times rational. There is no homo economicus. Economics is as much math as it is a social study.
While higher prices cab make products more appealing, that is not the primary reason why vegan products are more expensive.
I think others have covered the economies of scale and niche products creating the disparity.
But I wanted to suggest that if your grandpa is regularly eating gluten free bread, we have found that making it at home is SO much more affordable than buying a loaf at the store. (Even though gluten free flour is also more expensive.) Most of the gluten free flours have their own sandwich bread recipe, either on the bag or their website. I don’t know what flours you have access to, but they can be wildly different blends, so using their tested recipes is always best.
We’ve mastered our favorite so it takes only 15 minutes of “work” and then just time in the oven. It’s also much better than store bought! I don’t know if that’s possible for you, but it could be a lovely weekly ritual for you and your grandpa.
Also, to anyone suggesting we just eat rice and beans, I’m an old celiac. We went without bread, pasta, cake, pastries, cookies, brownies, pizza, and crackers before these products came to market. These are mostly “fun” foods that I don’t eat regularly, but usually pop up in social situations. Do you know how many sad birthdays with no cake we’ve had? How often we’ve watched our friends and family eat things we could never have? I am so grateful to the “fad” gluten free people who made it possible to have culturally/socially important foods we were missing out on for decades!!
Because they can
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.
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.
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.
Because they suck so they don’t sell as many so they make up the difference by charging more. Also a fool and his money are soon parted.
