this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
214 points (89.9% liked)
vegan
2684 readers
347 users here now
Please also check out vegantheoryclub.org for a great set of well-run communities for vegan news, cooking, gardening, and art. It is not federated with LW, but it is a nice, cozy, all-in-one space for vegans.
We ask that the you have an understanding on what veganism is before engaging in this community.
If you think you have been banned erroneously, please get in contact with one of the other mods for appeals.
Moderator reports may not federate properly and may delay moderator action. Please DM an active mod if an abusive comment remains after reporting it.
Welcome
Welcome to c/[email protected]. Broadly, this community is a place to discuss veganism. Discussion on intersectional topics related to the animal rights movement are also encouraged.
What is Veganism?
'Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals ...'
— abridged definition from The Vegan Society
Rules
The rules are subject to change, especially upon community feedback.
- Discrimination is not tolerated. This includes speciesism.
- Topics not relating to veganism are subject to removal.
- Posts are to be as accessible as practicable:
- embedded images of text require alt-text
- posts with an image of text should have a transcription in the body or alt-text
- paywalled articles must have an accessible non-paywalled link;
- use the original source whenever possible for a news article.
- Content warnings are required for triggering content.
- Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future.
- before jumping into the community, we encourage you to read examples of common fallacies here.
- if you're asking questions about veganism, be mindful that the person on the other end is trying to be helpful by answering you and treat them with at least as much respect as they give you.
- Posts and comments whose contents – text, images, etc. – are largely created by a generative AI model are subject to removal. We want you to be a part of the vegan community, not a multi-head attention layer running on a server farm.
- No brigading, either off-site or on-site. An incitement to brigade includes two elements: a call to disruptive action and a specific direction outside of this community in which to take that action. Exceptions include:
- Calls to boycott.
- Calls to in-person protest of a government, high-profile individual, or company/organization.
- Votes provided they have a sufficiently broad target audience or provably effective controls against vote brigading.
- Petitions.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service also apply.
Resources on Veganism
A compilation of many vegan resources/sites in a Google spreadsheet:
Here are some documentaries that are recommended to watch if planning to or have recently become vegan:
Vegan Fediverse
Lemmy:
vegantheoryclub.org
lemmy.vg
Mastodon:
veganism.social
Other Vegan Communities
General Vegan Comms
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Circlejerk Comms
[email protected]
[email protected]
Vegan Food / Cooking
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Attribution
- Banner image credit: Jean Weber of INRA on Wikimedia Commons
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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...