I’m not starving and I don’t eat meat. I just pay more for my food even though it costs less to produce. We should be incentivising more sustainable choices, because unless we scale down animal ag we all actually will starve.
It’s not cheaper to grow crops, the amount of work that goes into growing crops is a reason we have a shortage of labor to harvest them. It’s back breaking work and requires a ton of time. It’s also not a for sure thing. One bad season and you can lose entire tons of harvest.
I think you may be underestimating the heavy level of subsidies here
Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today.
Even despite that, overall in most countries it actually ends up being cheaper to do a healthy plant-based diet assuming you have more whole-foods and less say plant-based meats
It found that in high-income countries:
• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.
• Vegetarian diets were a close second.
• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.
• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.
Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed
the oxford study doesn’t account for people who don’t pay money for food, grow their own, hunt, fish, raise livestock, or even have it subsidized. basically, it doesn’t account for poor people anywhere in the developed world. you are jumping to conclusions to say that it is cheaper for anyone but the wealthiest people.
I disagree with your premise that it is misleading at all. Including things that the majority of the population does not do nor can scale to the overall population would not work for a modeling study. Most people are not hunters, including that in a cost estimation study would just be giving people a false sense of true cost. Real world data would be more reliable way for that if you wanted to try to include that in a more realistic way
most people get at least some of their food for free, subsidized, or through farming, gardening, or hunting. this study only accounted for foods taht people buy. it’s misleading to claim this represents accurately how much people spend on food.
First, it is always unclear whether the omitted-variable bias exists because the “true” model is unknown. Thus, future research may include more covariates other than the ones considered here to minimize the bias. Moreover, studies like the present study rely on consumers’ capacity to honestly report information on the food consumed. Future research may consider other methodologies that can actually observe and report all foods consumed and the cost associated with them. This way, it will also be possible to capture other personal, cultural, socio-economic, and behavioural characteristics of the consumers which are difficult to assess using the present methodology. However, data of this nature would be expensive to collect.
I’m not starving and I don’t eat meat. I just pay more for my food even though it costs less to produce. We should be incentivising more sustainable choices, because unless we scale down animal ag we all actually will starve.
It’s not cheaper to grow crops, the amount of work that goes into growing crops is a reason we have a shortage of labor to harvest them. It’s back breaking work and requires a ton of time. It’s also not a for sure thing. One bad season and you can lose entire tons of harvest.
I think you may be underestimating the heavy level of subsidies here
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
Even despite that, overall in most countries it actually ends up being cheaper to do a healthy plant-based diet assuming you have more whole-foods and less say plant-based meats
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
And real world data backs this up
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via%3Dihub —(looking at the US)
https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9
why didn’t you include the name of the study?
the oxford study doesn’t account for people who don’t pay money for food, grow their own, hunt, fish, raise livestock, or even have it subsidized. basically, it doesn’t account for poor people anywhere in the developed world. you are jumping to conclusions to say that it is cheaper for anyone but the wealthiest people.
I cited more than one study. The other ones looked at average real world spending data
i refuted the one i had already seen. i’ll deal with the others later.
so why include the misleading one?
I disagree with your premise that it is misleading at all. Including things that the majority of the population does not do nor can scale to the overall population would not work for a modeling study. Most people are not hunters, including that in a cost estimation study would just be giving people a false sense of true cost. Real world data would be more reliable way for that if you wanted to try to include that in a more realistic way
most people get at least some of their food for free, subsidized, or through farming, gardening, or hunting. this study only accounted for foods taht people buy. it’s misleading to claim this represents accurately how much people spend on food.
First, it is always unclear whether the omitted-variable bias exists because the “true” model is unknown. Thus, future research may include more covariates other than the ones considered here to minimize the bias. Moreover, studies like the present study rely on consumers’ capacity to honestly report information on the food consumed. Future research may consider other methodologies that can actually observe and report all foods consumed and the cost associated with them. This way, it will also be possible to capture other personal, cultural, socio-economic, and behavioural characteristics of the consumers which are difficult to assess using the present methodology. However, data of this nature would be expensive to collect.