Vegan Food is Overpriced (really, most of it, in 2018)
25 March 2018 [link youtube]
This video is not about the excuse offered by some meat eaters that they imagine a vegan diet would be more expensive… it is, instead, about the doleful reality that vegans themselves live with: rip-off food prices. Sadly, meat eaters are not wrong to regard the word "vegan" (where it appears on a label) as a pretext to raise prices: as with "organic" and "gluten free", that is too often the case.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
and I mean one of the recurring motifs
is just us being astounded like how can you charge $12 for a vegan cake the size of a muffin you know that was an extraordinary example of it yeah that was right I understand many of these being businesses they're almost like a charity they start up with a sense of quote serving the community close quote you know of being a kind of vegans feel about these businesses as if they're charities but if it's a charity who is the beneficiary and who's the donor right you can't be gouging vegans you can't be ripping off your fellow vegans in order to support what other group of people know make more sense if you want to run it as a charity incorporate as a nonprofit and actually sell those things that are their nonprofit you could do that a pancake is a pancake when you remove the eggs and you remove the dairy you remove the probably it's dairy powder or possibly butter or possibly milk whatever the recipes using you remove the eggs you with dairy why would the vegan pancake suddenly be way more expensive than not being a pancake and yet say that for a vegan muffin for a vegan cupcake for a vegan loaf of bread it's problematic to me that vegan becomes a luxury label very much like organic the organic label is now used to justify price inflation for jacking up prices that's it oh well but sir this is an organic bagel or this is an organic muffin so of course it's four times the price you know what I mean and again maybe it should be 5% more but it really doesn't it doesn't figure and it's it's just sad to see the vegan label going that way because veganism is for me an ethical and ecological cause that I care a great deal about I baddest yen yeah I bought a new lighting setup but it didn't come with a plug so we haven't plugged it in her I used the yogurt so you all have to suffer a horrible horrible video quality that you have as a result under this link but anyway look um babe we've talked about this IRL but we did know no prep for this video it's scary to me that vegan the word vegan becomes a label for overpriced food just buying overpriced food and that most of the time when you're looking at especially in restaurants but sometimes with prepared food sometimes at the grocery store items too when you're looking at vegan food you're normally looking something that is cheaper in terms of its ingredients in terms of its composition here's its production cost it's in that is cheap or ought to be cheap or should be cheaper than the meat item it's replacing the non vedo maestro but in fact it's more expensive yep I mean look this is a problem for many different angles in reality what we're talking about here it's like taking a sock and turning it inside out this is the inside-out sock of what so many other YouTube channels have complained about quote oh people complain that being vegan is too expensive but really it's cheap you just eat lentils and broccoli every day you know close quote because the reality is people perceive veganism as too expensive because the word vegan has become a label for luxury food and a justification for things being overpriced right yeah like today we went to a bakery and they had a kind of apple cake apple strudel kind of thing that happened to be vegan wasn't labeled as vegan wasn't marketed as vegan and it was really cheap it was really well priced which stunned us we've recently been all over the world we did just the most recent trip was China Thailand France Detroit then Seattle Vancouver long long long trip and I mean one of the recurring motifs is just us being astounded like how can you charge $12 for a vegan cake the size of a muffin you know that was an extraordinary example of it yeah that was right they are overpriced and they're overpriced when it's a non vegan place with just one or two vegan items legal label interpreted as such and they're overpriced when the whole the whole restaurant of the whole operation is vegan you know with very very few exceptions look say what you really feel but I put this question to you you saw the reaction we got when we just talked about price versus quality in our review of the different restaurants in Detroit we have one video that talks we attempt to review every single vegan restaurant in both Detroit and Ann Arbor two cities that are close to each other in the United States America responded on patreon to you and another person on the post that I made for the Detroit vegan group Facebook group they commented that they have to choose certain ingredients which are more expensive to verify that the baked goods are indeed vegan so making sure that the sugar is organic so that it has been verified to be vegan and yeah and I you know I can sympathize and I think there may be some up taking costs for some of the ingredients in vegan baked goods but yeah it is it does seem to just be astronomical compared to what you would expect I mean right now we are going to start baking more at home and so would be good to do like a cost analysis of what the different ingredients cost and you know having all vegan ingredients you know like if you can actually estimate like how much this one cupcake should cost with all the ingredients because we're purchasing the ingredients ourselves all right so um well in some ways the free market is irrational I use this example the time just discussions within the relationship like not in formal essays if I say all the time like well how much is a bottle of champagne worth I mean a bottle of champagne can be $100 a bottle drinking champagne can be $10,000 and a bottle of champagne I think in theory can be ten or twenty dollars that you'd find really cheap champagne well it's not because they're it's not because there were more grapes it's not because the grapes cost more you know I mean just recently we're we are just starting out in the kitchen so we're getting all the you know all the condiments that you yeah so we were getting soy sauce and it was like okay that's right so good example you get one for like a smaller amount for what was close to like ten dollars or you can get one that's two dollars and it's to be full of artificial ingredients and that was the next thing was gonna say you're sorry isn't soybeans the first ingredients water or like right right right right now artificial flavor anything that makes it sound so that was what I was gonna say right back but actually the range of prices in soy sauce it's easier to explain than the range of prices in bottles of champagne or vegan baked goods like a vegan cookie or vegan loaf of bread or vegan cupcake because you know real sense what is soy sauce it's actually more debatable anything that tastes like soy sauce and is black in color can get sold as soy sauce but actually when you read the labels the more expensive soy sauce had genuinely different ingredients now even then it's kind of ridiculous how like soy sauce can be two dollars it gonna be twenty dollars seems a little seems a little hard to justify but it's true uh but no you know if you're if you really measure it out at home if you're making a cupcake how many pennies worth of different is is it in your buying these ingredients in bulk you're not buying them in little fancy gift bags if you've I mean the difference in the price of the sugar can't explain you know quadrupling or sex toppling the price like you know totally maybe maybe it has to be ten percent more expensive because you're using a slightly finer sugar than your competition but know your non vegan bakeries they may be using you know a Pharaoh a sugar that costs as much anyway you know they may not be using the cheapest sugar just because of flavor you know what I mean they could be they could be using a sugar more expensive than the vegan bakers that's entirely possible you know they can just be using a fine Baker sugar for whatever reason you know that's the effect they want so you'd be looking at a few tiny percentage points five percent more the price or something due to a difference in the cost and but I mean otherwise a pancake is a pancake when you remove the eggs and you remove the dairy you remove the probably it's dairy powder or possibly butter or possibly milk whatever the recipes using you remove the eggs you with dairy why would the vegan pancake suddenly be way more expensive than not being a pancake and yet say that for a vegan muffin for a and cupcake for a V a vegan loaf of bread I mean you know plenty of bread is accidentally vegan anyway it just doesn't happen to use those ingredients without declaring itself vegan but it's problematic to me that vegan becomes a luxury label very much like organic you know and and tied in people's minds I think you can see where's Mars yeah right yeah yeah yeah yeah right as if vegan and gluten-free are interchangeable bakery asking for vegan food you know they tell us like yeah it's I mean I know I know some people really do have celiac disease yes but but if you don't if you don't if you're not a celiac you don't have that disease then see the gluten-free is not an ethical crusade or cause or it's not a movement in that sense the way veganism is anybody's also I don't believe there's any religion in the world that supports celiac disease as a creed or a matter of faith you know I have said to you that when we go around those shops and you see like you let's say you're standing in a display case in a coffee shop showed out to JJ beam so GJ beam is a relatively small coffee shop chain competing with Starbucks but they are chain there are there are you know they're a fairly large company in that sense but if you're maybe they have ten shops or 15 shops it's like but they're they're not huge as a change um but you know when you stand in front of that case and you just see the word vegan next to several they several of the sandwiches several of the cookies you know have vegan when you think about it that's an incredibly powerful form of marketing or advertising or promotion and they aren't more expensive sandwiches and cookies I think there are millions there are millions of ten-year-old kids who will see that in the case and just ask what is vegan you know I can remember being a little kid and asking what is halal or what is coach you know when something is listed as hell out then you find out what halal is when you see food with this kind of thing next to it so you know this is a really powerful thing but the flipside is um very I'm very uncomfortable with I mean the word vegan basically becoming a pretext for price gouging yes I think we see we see all the time yeah well you were just talking about the bakery that did end up failing here in Victoria right that's right and you felt their prices were too expensive and it's something that you you know you butted heads with the owner about but we were just at a vegan meetup and you were talking about someone brought up that they like mentioned that bakery and you said oh well they went out of business and she was like yeah well the costs were too high maybe she spent twenty dollars for like a sampler of the right items that she sold so um so this was a this was a this was a vegan bakery it was a new start up here in Victoria but it's not a charity it's a business which I respect you know it's trying to break even or make some money or what have you you know it's got the responsibilities of a business now I wouldn't really say I butted heads with the owner and what the price is but I just said to her okay I want to order bagels in advance so you have to realize that for a baker there is no risk if you're only taking orders in advance if I wake up in the morning and I bake a hundred bagels and then I go out and sell them and maybe only 60 of them sell and then 40 go in the garbage that's an element of risk maybe some days I sell out maybe on Saturday and Sunday I sell all my bagels but maybe on a Monday and Tuesday or maybe it rains it's a business like that bake it there's bad weather it's snowing and people don't come to buy your bagels maybe of one day we only sell 10 percent your bagels and 90 percent go in the garbage that's risk and in capitalism risk is linked to reward and that is part of the price structure for baked goods is people trying to predict what percentage of them will sell and what percentage of them will end up being composted or worse right so I said to her look I'm sorry but your prices work out to like over two dollars and fifty cents of a goal or something even when I'm buying by the Dozen and even when I'm ordering in advance now you know actually bagels are overpriced here in Victoria anyway right I mean we should do some more reading about that yeah there's been a scandal about that in Canada where some corporations have been admitting intentionally price-fixing intentionally conspiring it would be an antitrust case of a situation but intentionally multiple companies engaging in a form conspiracy to raise the price of bread for the customers so there are factors there but even with that aside you know you're looking at about one dollar per bagel buying at a normal grocery store here you can be a little bit more a little bit less dollar twenty five or you know maybe eighty ninety cents per bagel this kind of thing you know um so I just said you were how can I justify if I'm buying this in advance well it doesn't thanks so much the big one she didn't hear it so look I feel long story short all I'm saying is you've got to hear it I mean how you know again like you can't I understand many of these being businesses they're almost like a charity they start up with a sense of quote serving the community close quote you know of being a kind of vegans feel about these businesses as if they're charities but if it's a charity who is the beneficiary and who's the donor right you can't be gouging vegans you can't be ripping off your fellow vegans in order to support what other group of people you know make more sense if you want to run it as a charity incorporate as a nonprofit and actually sell those things that uh they're nonprofit you could do that I mean they're they're religious groups that do that providing food forth in their own religion and then don't market it as a business but um you know anyway it's it's tough I mean I you know of course people have to make a living you know but we live in a world where Tim Hortons it's a donut store Tim saw Tim Hortons sells a donut for one dollar I think they're 99 cents in Canada and you have a vegan donut place you know what was it three dollars and fifty cents I think so I don't want to name it cuz I'll get getting the price wrong but we've seen three dollars and fifty cents a donut for for a vegan donut yeah and we've seen worse that's not the worst example not by a long shot you know I could maybe understand it be more expensive than non vegan baked goods but not a bagel yeah Biggles just gonna be the same price so why are you charging more for right you can bagel like I know right no but but look in terms of ingredients for a bagel you're making sure the bagel does not have honey some bagels have money the bagel does not have eggs some people surveys how can that justify inflating the price and it's not like there's beautiful icing on it's not just a roll of personal creativity in terms of you know the way that some specialized because there's element of presentation or plating or something else that goes into it I just thought about this too it's it's that the person that commented on my Detroit vegans post said that they have to guarantee that it's organic sugar because these particular organic is not vegans that's right that's true organic uses cows blood well nobody that is the thing the organic label is now used to justify price inflation for jacking up prices that's it oh well but sir this is an organic baked lure this is an organic muffin so of course it's four times the price you know what I mean and again maybe it should be 5% more but it really doesn't doesn't figure and it's it's just sad to see the vegan label going that way because veganism is for me an ethical and ecological cause that I care a great deal about that's a wrap a bonus Yin
is just us being astounded like how can you charge $12 for a vegan cake the size of a muffin you know that was an extraordinary example of it yeah that was right I understand many of these being businesses they're almost like a charity they start up with a sense of quote serving the community close quote you know of being a kind of vegans feel about these businesses as if they're charities but if it's a charity who is the beneficiary and who's the donor right you can't be gouging vegans you can't be ripping off your fellow vegans in order to support what other group of people know make more sense if you want to run it as a charity incorporate as a nonprofit and actually sell those things that are their nonprofit you could do that a pancake is a pancake when you remove the eggs and you remove the dairy you remove the probably it's dairy powder or possibly butter or possibly milk whatever the recipes using you remove the eggs you with dairy why would the vegan pancake suddenly be way more expensive than not being a pancake and yet say that for a vegan muffin for a vegan cupcake for a vegan loaf of bread it's problematic to me that vegan becomes a luxury label very much like organic the organic label is now used to justify price inflation for jacking up prices that's it oh well but sir this is an organic bagel or this is an organic muffin so of course it's four times the price you know what I mean and again maybe it should be 5% more but it really doesn't it doesn't figure and it's it's just sad to see the vegan label going that way because veganism is for me an ethical and ecological cause that I care a great deal about I baddest yen yeah I bought a new lighting setup but it didn't come with a plug so we haven't plugged it in her I used the yogurt so you all have to suffer a horrible horrible video quality that you have as a result under this link but anyway look um babe we've talked about this IRL but we did know no prep for this video it's scary to me that vegan the word vegan becomes a label for overpriced food just buying overpriced food and that most of the time when you're looking at especially in restaurants but sometimes with prepared food sometimes at the grocery store items too when you're looking at vegan food you're normally looking something that is cheaper in terms of its ingredients in terms of its composition here's its production cost it's in that is cheap or ought to be cheap or should be cheaper than the meat item it's replacing the non vedo maestro but in fact it's more expensive yep I mean look this is a problem for many different angles in reality what we're talking about here it's like taking a sock and turning it inside out this is the inside-out sock of what so many other YouTube channels have complained about quote oh people complain that being vegan is too expensive but really it's cheap you just eat lentils and broccoli every day you know close quote because the reality is people perceive veganism as too expensive because the word vegan has become a label for luxury food and a justification for things being overpriced right yeah like today we went to a bakery and they had a kind of apple cake apple strudel kind of thing that happened to be vegan wasn't labeled as vegan wasn't marketed as vegan and it was really cheap it was really well priced which stunned us we've recently been all over the world we did just the most recent trip was China Thailand France Detroit then Seattle Vancouver long long long trip and I mean one of the recurring motifs is just us being astounded like how can you charge $12 for a vegan cake the size of a muffin you know that was an extraordinary example of it yeah that was right they are overpriced and they're overpriced when it's a non vegan place with just one or two vegan items legal label interpreted as such and they're overpriced when the whole the whole restaurant of the whole operation is vegan you know with very very few exceptions look say what you really feel but I put this question to you you saw the reaction we got when we just talked about price versus quality in our review of the different restaurants in Detroit we have one video that talks we attempt to review every single vegan restaurant in both Detroit and Ann Arbor two cities that are close to each other in the United States America responded on patreon to you and another person on the post that I made for the Detroit vegan group Facebook group they commented that they have to choose certain ingredients which are more expensive to verify that the baked goods are indeed vegan so making sure that the sugar is organic so that it has been verified to be vegan and yeah and I you know I can sympathize and I think there may be some up taking costs for some of the ingredients in vegan baked goods but yeah it is it does seem to just be astronomical compared to what you would expect I mean right now we are going to start baking more at home and so would be good to do like a cost analysis of what the different ingredients cost and you know having all vegan ingredients you know like if you can actually estimate like how much this one cupcake should cost with all the ingredients because we're purchasing the ingredients ourselves all right so um well in some ways the free market is irrational I use this example the time just discussions within the relationship like not in formal essays if I say all the time like well how much is a bottle of champagne worth I mean a bottle of champagne can be $100 a bottle drinking champagne can be $10,000 and a bottle of champagne I think in theory can be ten or twenty dollars that you'd find really cheap champagne well it's not because they're it's not because there were more grapes it's not because the grapes cost more you know I mean just recently we're we are just starting out in the kitchen so we're getting all the you know all the condiments that you yeah so we were getting soy sauce and it was like okay that's right so good example you get one for like a smaller amount for what was close to like ten dollars or you can get one that's two dollars and it's to be full of artificial ingredients and that was the next thing was gonna say you're sorry isn't soybeans the first ingredients water or like right right right right now artificial flavor anything that makes it sound so that was what I was gonna say right back but actually the range of prices in soy sauce it's easier to explain than the range of prices in bottles of champagne or vegan baked goods like a vegan cookie or vegan loaf of bread or vegan cupcake because you know real sense what is soy sauce it's actually more debatable anything that tastes like soy sauce and is black in color can get sold as soy sauce but actually when you read the labels the more expensive soy sauce had genuinely different ingredients now even then it's kind of ridiculous how like soy sauce can be two dollars it gonna be twenty dollars seems a little seems a little hard to justify but it's true uh but no you know if you're if you really measure it out at home if you're making a cupcake how many pennies worth of different is is it in your buying these ingredients in bulk you're not buying them in little fancy gift bags if you've I mean the difference in the price of the sugar can't explain you know quadrupling or sex toppling the price like you know totally maybe maybe it has to be ten percent more expensive because you're using a slightly finer sugar than your competition but know your non vegan bakeries they may be using you know a Pharaoh a sugar that costs as much anyway you know they may not be using the cheapest sugar just because of flavor you know what I mean they could be they could be using a sugar more expensive than the vegan bakers that's entirely possible you know they can just be using a fine Baker sugar for whatever reason you know that's the effect they want so you'd be looking at a few tiny percentage points five percent more the price or something due to a difference in the cost and but I mean otherwise a pancake is a pancake when you remove the eggs and you remove the dairy you remove the probably it's dairy powder or possibly butter or possibly milk whatever the recipes using you remove the eggs you with dairy why would the vegan pancake suddenly be way more expensive than not being a pancake and yet say that for a vegan muffin for a and cupcake for a V a vegan loaf of bread I mean you know plenty of bread is accidentally vegan anyway it just doesn't happen to use those ingredients without declaring itself vegan but it's problematic to me that vegan becomes a luxury label very much like organic you know and and tied in people's minds I think you can see where's Mars yeah right yeah yeah yeah yeah right as if vegan and gluten-free are interchangeable bakery asking for vegan food you know they tell us like yeah it's I mean I know I know some people really do have celiac disease yes but but if you don't if you don't if you're not a celiac you don't have that disease then see the gluten-free is not an ethical crusade or cause or it's not a movement in that sense the way veganism is anybody's also I don't believe there's any religion in the world that supports celiac disease as a creed or a matter of faith you know I have said to you that when we go around those shops and you see like you let's say you're standing in a display case in a coffee shop showed out to JJ beam so GJ beam is a relatively small coffee shop chain competing with Starbucks but they are chain there are there are you know they're a fairly large company in that sense but if you're maybe they have ten shops or 15 shops it's like but they're they're not huge as a change um but you know when you stand in front of that case and you just see the word vegan next to several they several of the sandwiches several of the cookies you know have vegan when you think about it that's an incredibly powerful form of marketing or advertising or promotion and they aren't more expensive sandwiches and cookies I think there are millions there are millions of ten-year-old kids who will see that in the case and just ask what is vegan you know I can remember being a little kid and asking what is halal or what is coach you know when something is listed as hell out then you find out what halal is when you see food with this kind of thing next to it so you know this is a really powerful thing but the flipside is um very I'm very uncomfortable with I mean the word vegan basically becoming a pretext for price gouging yes I think we see we see all the time yeah well you were just talking about the bakery that did end up failing here in Victoria right that's right and you felt their prices were too expensive and it's something that you you know you butted heads with the owner about but we were just at a vegan meetup and you were talking about someone brought up that they like mentioned that bakery and you said oh well they went out of business and she was like yeah well the costs were too high maybe she spent twenty dollars for like a sampler of the right items that she sold so um so this was a this was a this was a vegan bakery it was a new start up here in Victoria but it's not a charity it's a business which I respect you know it's trying to break even or make some money or what have you you know it's got the responsibilities of a business now I wouldn't really say I butted heads with the owner and what the price is but I just said to her okay I want to order bagels in advance so you have to realize that for a baker there is no risk if you're only taking orders in advance if I wake up in the morning and I bake a hundred bagels and then I go out and sell them and maybe only 60 of them sell and then 40 go in the garbage that's an element of risk maybe some days I sell out maybe on Saturday and Sunday I sell all my bagels but maybe on a Monday and Tuesday or maybe it rains it's a business like that bake it there's bad weather it's snowing and people don't come to buy your bagels maybe of one day we only sell 10 percent your bagels and 90 percent go in the garbage that's risk and in capitalism risk is linked to reward and that is part of the price structure for baked goods is people trying to predict what percentage of them will sell and what percentage of them will end up being composted or worse right so I said to her look I'm sorry but your prices work out to like over two dollars and fifty cents of a goal or something even when I'm buying by the Dozen and even when I'm ordering in advance now you know actually bagels are overpriced here in Victoria anyway right I mean we should do some more reading about that yeah there's been a scandal about that in Canada where some corporations have been admitting intentionally price-fixing intentionally conspiring it would be an antitrust case of a situation but intentionally multiple companies engaging in a form conspiracy to raise the price of bread for the customers so there are factors there but even with that aside you know you're looking at about one dollar per bagel buying at a normal grocery store here you can be a little bit more a little bit less dollar twenty five or you know maybe eighty ninety cents per bagel this kind of thing you know um so I just said you were how can I justify if I'm buying this in advance well it doesn't thanks so much the big one she didn't hear it so look I feel long story short all I'm saying is you've got to hear it I mean how you know again like you can't I understand many of these being businesses they're almost like a charity they start up with a sense of quote serving the community close quote you know of being a kind of vegans feel about these businesses as if they're charities but if it's a charity who is the beneficiary and who's the donor right you can't be gouging vegans you can't be ripping off your fellow vegans in order to support what other group of people you know make more sense if you want to run it as a charity incorporate as a nonprofit and actually sell those things that uh they're nonprofit you could do that I mean they're they're religious groups that do that providing food forth in their own religion and then don't market it as a business but um you know anyway it's it's tough I mean I you know of course people have to make a living you know but we live in a world where Tim Hortons it's a donut store Tim saw Tim Hortons sells a donut for one dollar I think they're 99 cents in Canada and you have a vegan donut place you know what was it three dollars and fifty cents I think so I don't want to name it cuz I'll get getting the price wrong but we've seen three dollars and fifty cents a donut for for a vegan donut yeah and we've seen worse that's not the worst example not by a long shot you know I could maybe understand it be more expensive than non vegan baked goods but not a bagel yeah Biggles just gonna be the same price so why are you charging more for right you can bagel like I know right no but but look in terms of ingredients for a bagel you're making sure the bagel does not have honey some bagels have money the bagel does not have eggs some people surveys how can that justify inflating the price and it's not like there's beautiful icing on it's not just a roll of personal creativity in terms of you know the way that some specialized because there's element of presentation or plating or something else that goes into it I just thought about this too it's it's that the person that commented on my Detroit vegans post said that they have to guarantee that it's organic sugar because these particular organic is not vegans that's right that's true organic uses cows blood well nobody that is the thing the organic label is now used to justify price inflation for jacking up prices that's it oh well but sir this is an organic baked lure this is an organic muffin so of course it's four times the price you know what I mean and again maybe it should be 5% more but it really doesn't doesn't figure and it's it's just sad to see the vegan label going that way because veganism is for me an ethical and ecological cause that I care a great deal about that's a wrap a bonus Yin