Thanks for this. I’m surprised how consistently the studies point in favor of vegan diets being cheaper on the whole (though I’ll caveat none of these are too convincing: the headline RCT is testing a low-fat vegan diet instead of a general vegan diet and the rest are descriptive regressions / modeling exercises).
All that said, I’m wondering if perception of vegan diets being more expensive could be explained by:
Fully plant-based diets are cheaper but various “halfway points” are more expensive.
Meat-eaters mostly get exposure to the “halfway points”. These could be:
The only vegetarian in a meat-eating group who’s stuck buying the heavily marked-up vegetarian option at the steakhouse
The only vegetarian in a meat-eating household who buys groceries and/or does the cooking but can’t economize on legume-based recipes.
The lone transitioning vegetarian who’s goes through a long learning period since they don’t have a plant-based community to learn cooking techniques or new cuisines or hear where to get affordable produce.
There’s some descriptive evidence from “Some vegetarians spend less money on food, others don’t” (Jayson & Lusk 2016) pointing in this direction. The researchers do a neat classification trick where they split vegetarians into partial vegetarians and pure vegetarians. Partial vegetarians are those that identify as vegetarian but still report purchasing / consuming meat products. Spending is highest for partial vegetarians followed by meat-eaters followed by pure vegetarians.
Those results are confounded by demographics. But I still think it points to some things that seem under explored in these studies. Would love to hear of other studies about financial costs for transitioning vegans / social taxes for vegans in meat-eating communities
Thanks for this. I’m surprised how consistently the studies point in favor of vegan diets being cheaper on the whole (though I’ll caveat none of these are too convincing: the headline RCT is testing a low-fat vegan diet instead of a general vegan diet and the rest are descriptive regressions / modeling exercises).
All that said, I’m wondering if perception of vegan diets being more expensive could be explained by:
Fully plant-based diets are cheaper but various “halfway points” are more expensive.
Meat-eaters mostly get exposure to the “halfway points”. These could be:
The only vegetarian in a meat-eating group who’s stuck buying the heavily marked-up vegetarian option at the steakhouse
The only vegetarian in a meat-eating household who buys groceries and/or does the cooking but can’t economize on legume-based recipes.
The lone transitioning vegetarian who’s goes through a long learning period since they don’t have a plant-based community to learn cooking techniques or new cuisines or hear where to get affordable produce.
There’s some descriptive evidence from “Some vegetarians spend less money on food, others don’t” (Jayson & Lusk 2016) pointing in this direction. The researchers do a neat classification trick where they split vegetarians into partial vegetarians and pure vegetarians. Partial vegetarians are those that identify as vegetarian but still report purchasing / consuming meat products. Spending is highest for partial vegetarians followed by meat-eaters followed by pure vegetarians.
Those results are confounded by demographics. But I still think it points to some things that seem under explored in these studies. Would love to hear of other studies about financial costs for transitioning vegans / social taxes for vegans in meat-eating communities