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The False Expense of Plant-Based Diets

Don’t let the food companies sell you a lie

Kitiara Pascoe
5 min readJul 1, 2019
Yuuuuum — Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

In an April episode of the British TV show Food Unwrapped, the team discovered that vegan burgers and other processed vegan foods were far more expensive than meat-based foods per kilo.

They did a little vox pop test on the street too — getting passersby to put foods in order depending on how much they thought they cost.

Most people thought a whole fresh chicken would be one of the most expensive while the plant-based foods? Cheaper, surely.

Aside from touching on the high nutrient value and benefits of plant-based diets (a topic deserving its own article), what was amazing was how expensive ‘vegan’ food was.

On the face of it, it kind of looks like only wealthy people can afford to become vegan or even vegetarian.

And there’s a really good reason why this appears to be the case.

Food manufacturers can’t increase the price of raw vegetables, legumes and grains. So they’re inventing foods they can increase the price of.

The false expense of plant-based

For the purposes of simplicity, I’m generalising the term ‘plant-based’ to exclude all meat and fish products. This includes foods…

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Kitiara Pascoe
Kitiara Pascoe

Written by Kitiara Pascoe

Senior Brand Writer | Outdoor Adventure Writer | Author of In Bed with the Atlantic (Fernhurst, 2018) | kitiarapascoe.com | Youtube: https://bit.ly/3uQPWh3

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