There’s been some talk recently about how expensive it is to eat a vegan diet.
Veganism has had some resurgence recently and there are a couple of important points I’d like to write about.
Firstly, veganism is about avoiding meat products so the diet is made up with fruit, vegetables, grains, pulses, etc. These are all fairly cheap foods. One reason to go vegan may be to save money!
Looking more closely, I find that the the reason why people think veganism is expensive is because of the vegan-friendly foods that are available in the supermarket - vegan milk, vegan cheese, etc.
For myself, I eat a normal diet including meat, fish, etc., but I do have to avoid dairy for health reasons. When I discovered I had this problem I cut dairy right out - I started taking tea and coffee black, I made porridge with water, etc. I just cut out anything that even looked like a milk product and even if I do have soya milk, for example, it makes me nervous.
So from my point of view I am puzzled that people who go vegan want to eat foods that mimic meat and dairy products - more so if they are switching for ethical reasons. It is true that to eat a healthy vegan diet you have to be careful about balance. You would need to take great care to make sure you include all the nutrients your body needs, but buying nut milk isn’t necessarily the way to achieve that.
The other important point is to recognise the market led world we live in. Manufacturers will make and shops will sell what sells. They have spotted that there is a market for milk and cheese substitutes and so they are filling that gap.
The point here is that it’s their job to try and sell us stuff and it’s our job to make sensible choices of our own and resist the pressure to buy. That’s across everything - not just what we eat.
So, just because shops sell nut milk and alternatives to cheese it doesn’t mean we have to buy them.
You can see this in the wide range of gluten-free products on sale. There is a huge range of these - some of which never did contain gluten and the rest have a different recipe.
It’s inevitable that these alternatives would cost more, not just because people will pay for them, but because if it was cheaper to make certain products without gluten they’d already be gluten-free. Finding alternative ingredients, making them work in a recipe and making the result taste as good as the competition costs more to achieve.
Comparing nut milk to cows’ milk is a particular example of this. The supermarkets have driven down the price of cows’ milk to such a degree that dairy farming is hardly profitable any more. The process to extract ‘milk’ from nuts is an entirely different process so why would we expect nut milks to be comparable in price?
So, in summary, choose what to eat wisely and don’t be led by advertising and what’s tempting on the shelves. If you do switch to a vegan diet embrace it and leave the animal substitute products behind as well as the animal products themselves.
Footnote - to eat a vegan diet and remain healthy you do need to know what keeps a vegan diet balanced. Seek advice from medially qualified sources.
e.g. NHS (https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Vegetarianhealth/Pages/Vegandiets.aspx).
