This past week we featured a post that spotlighted what I felt was important news: A plant-based diet is now cheaper than a conventional meat-focused one. But how much will the price factor ultimately influence your move to a veggie diet?
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow… But soon – and for the rest of your life! You’ll be shifting from a meat-based ‘classic Western’ diet to plant-based proteins. For some folks, the change will be harrowing. They’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into the inevitable future – and cursing the unrelenting high price of beef. Others, however, will be ready for the change. But I predict they will not go gentle into that good supper-time, either…
How important is price?
There are many factors that come into play – and interact with one another – in the complex dynamic of what I call The Great Sift – from meat to plants.
These include practical sustainability (in the face of the climate change), the economic instability of the evolving food supply system, the overall read-iness of the world to feed the 10 billion hungry souls who’ll be here by 2050. But there are other, passive pressures that complicate the picture fur-ther. Like, many humans’ historic preference for meat proteins.
There’s also the relative unfamiliarity of the Western half of the world with Asian daily realities such as tofu, peas and beans (and other legumes), nuts and seeds, and ancient grains. (Consider the yummy-looking Tofu Broccoli Stir-fry, pictured above.)
But one factor that should be important to our choice of dominant dietary protein is price. Especially in the face of persistent high and increasingly unsustainable meat costs…
What would it take?
The post I mentioned earlier showed that the average family of 4 could save as much as $1,700 a year if it switched to a blant-based diet right now. Forget about 5 years or a decade from now. Much less, ‘by 2050’…
But nobody is talking about this surprising reality. Much less pressing us to ‘take the cue’.
It’s equally surprising that no influencers are talking about the fundamental price and sustainability of a plant-based diet – in as much as we can all help feed ourselves by growing at least some of our own food – on some scale or another – if we’re focusing on plants, rather than meat.
The meats Westerners prefer are exclusively farmed: beef, chicken, pork, and a few others. Or, like fish and seafood, they’re predominantly wild-caught, and as such becoming less sustainable and more expensive by the day. It would be profoundly impractical for your average urban-dweller to get into livestock ‘farming’.
And let’s not forget the time and effort commitment required, even to tend a couple of window-box tomato plants. Most of us these days live lives that just weren’t built to accommodate that kind of thing…
My take
But I want to focus on the price factor, today. All other considerations being equal, as they say…
My questions to you:
How profound a price differential would it take to shift your voluntary food choice preferences from meat to veggies?
Could you ever give up meat altogether, no matter how relatively inexpensive plant-based substitutes become?
Which is all to say… How hard will you kick and how loudly will you scream ‘when the time comes’?
And how far off do you think ‘the time’ is – for you?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.