Isn't veganism expensive and elitist?

The objection

“Veganism is for people with money. Fake meat and oat lattes cost a fortune, ordinary people can’t afford it.”

The answer

Some vegan products are expensive. The diet built on staples is among the cheapest food there is. The objection confuses the premium aisle with the food itself.

The cheapest calories and the cheapest protein on the planet are plants: dried beans, lentils, rice, oats, potatoes, frozen and seasonal veg. These are what fed working people for centuries, precisely because they were affordable and kept well. Meat was the luxury. Calling beans elitist gets food history exactly backwards.

This has been properly tested. The most comprehensive global costing of diets, Springmann and colleagues in Lancet Planetary Health (2021), spanned 150 countries and found that in high-income countries, healthy plant-based diets were generally cheaper than the current meat-heavy diet, with vegan and vegetarian patterns among the least costly options. Not “affordable if you try” but genuinely cheaper.

And the steak you’re comparing against carries a hidden price tag. Animal agriculture is propped up by public money: direct subsidies, cheap feed, and environmental and health costs the taxpayer absorbs. Global farm support runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, much of it favouring emissions-intensive animal products (FAO). Meat looks cheap at the till because you already paid for it elsewhere.

Strip all that away and the objection shrinks to something small. Some vegan products carry a premium, exactly as some products in every cuisine do, and nobody is obliged to buy them.

The person eating beans and rice isn’t the one being asked to spend more. That’s the person insisting on the twice-paid-for steak.