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No but like seriously, why are vegan and vegetarian options always MORE expensive at restaurants. Whenever I cook my self, the meat is BY FAR the most expensive part of any meal. Meanwhile stuff like soy strips are DIRT CHEAP, not to mention they last basically forever!
The canteen I go to for lunch actually sells the meatless meals for 2/3 of the price, always a taunting reminder. Like hell yea, that's how ya convert me!
Overhead, really. The margins on restaurants are knife-edge thin already. Most of the cost of a meal goes to wages, rent, utilities and then the tiny sliver left over goes to ingredients and profit. Any savings from cooking all veg meals is thus completely absorbed by the losses from having such a smaller market, thus prices have to go up to make up the shortfall. It helps that most people are willing to shell out a little more to support their principles, though the cost is why you never see vegan restaurants in poor areas - people can't afford the fee to eat morally.
capitalism: it sucks!
Jamaica with its 30 vegan restaurants proves your point wrong.
It is actually in fact 30% cheaper to source a whole foods plant-based diet
Source: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
Sorry but... no, my point absolutely stands. I'm just pulling my data from HappyCow and TripAdvisor, but Jamaica has way more than thirty vegan restaurants. 141 that have enough of an internet presence that I can find them before this hangover forced me to stop looking. Happycow has an extremely convenient breakdown by area, too, which shows the regional concentration of veggie/vegan restaurants. And, if you do the math, ~90% of them are in high population density coastal towns with heavily tourism-dependent economies, which is what I'd expect to find (I didn't control for the obvious potential sampling bias, but it's a small enough country we can probably assume we're working with a population here). "Specialty" restaurants, which category unfortunately vegan/veggie venues fall into in the western meme, are even more at risk of failing than the average due to the restricted market appeal, and so require a larger population (and economic base) to support them.
I feel like my comment has touched a nerve with people due to my own inelegance while stating my point. I'm not saying that eating morally has a fee associated with it, I'm well aware of how much cheaper it can be to eat a veggie-heavy or full vegan diet. I am saying that dining out has fees associated with it, and that the cost of dining out has very little to do with the price of the ingredients (even for perceived 'luxury' meals like in steakhouses or hotpot) and almost everything to do with the operational overhead of running a restaurant (wages, facilities, utilities). Vegetarian dishes at mixed meat/veggie locations are a 'money maker' for the restaurant, because those dishes can be priced similarly to more-expensive ones but cost less to produce. But even that expanded profit margin is always going to be a much smaller percentage than the base cost of the meal, which is defined by the aforesaid overhead.
I'm quite sorry that I didn't make that clearer in my initial drunken 3am comment!
Happycow breakdown
Maybe it's different in America, but we actually have a few cheap vegetarian joints here in Prague, and their prices are pretty unmatched, even by other cheap lunch places. I just find it weird that the wast majority of places that sell meatless stuff, are capable of selling it for like twice the price of the rest.
I also find the "overhead" argument hard to belive, considering that all you need for soya strips/chunks is throw a but load of them into hot water for 10 minutes and that'll last the entire bloody day. Unlike meat that can barely leave the fridge. Meat also generally makes a bigger mess, the only worthy competitor is some cheeses. And other things take even less effort than meat, meals that primarily use nuts or beans, or if you don't wanna go full vegan, cheese and eggs also open the doors to plenty of dishes. Like ever heard of tiger eggs?
As generally used, "overhead" doesn't address the topic with a degree of granularity that takes the difficulty of preparation into account. It simply means the operating expenses associated with the business - wages, facilities and utilities are by far the three largest aspects, raw materials, consumables and related equipment costs are (depending on the industry) anywhere from a minor line item to little more than a rounding error. This is true for essentially every industry you care to name (I actually can't think of an exception. Maybe NFTs or some related crypto nonsense? Though even those famously have to factor in utilities).
TL;GTTP: The type of food you're preparing matters comically less than where your restaurant is located and the size of your staff.
Yea I get that, and my question is, why is the vegan or even just vegetarian option at the same restaurant more expensive? And like up to 50% more so? I'd argue it doesn't take any longer to make a meatless dish, nor does it require any unique equipment/procedure. The only logical explanation I can see, is if you intentionally use some super expensive replacement lab meat or demand is soo low that the allocated storage would be better served with something more popular, at which point why even sell it? Prep is basically non-existant compared to meat, so extraordinary work can't be it. The only realistic things I can think of is a lack of demand. Hmmm, in the context of America that seems a lot more likely actually...