Inflation Is Another Reason to Ditch Meat

Vegans have figured out something critical: in these days of high inflation, choosing vegan proteins is a great way to beat inflation at the grocery store. Prices for everything are increasing, but meat made from animals is getting more expensive a lot faster than vegan protein sources like beans and tofu.

It’s Hard to Miss Food Price Inflation

Inflation has been a hot topic in the past few years, with consumer prices rising throughout the economy. You might have noticed that things cost noticeably more now than they did a year or two ago.

Overall in the US, prices rose 3% in the past year but food prices rose more than 5%.

Everyone has to buy food, so people really feel those increases.

The Increasing Cost of Cruelty

Over the past five years, the price of mashed-up muscle and connective tissue from cows and bulls tortured in nightmarish death factories (aka “ground beef”) has increased by more than 50% to its highest prices ever. That includes a rise of about 14% in just the past two years.

Cows and bulls are social, sensitive beings with incredibly acute senses: they have 300-degree panoramic vision and communicate with their friends with facial expressions. They even seem to be able to sense magnetic fields, aligning their bodies on a north-south axis if they can.

Across all the ways these animals’ bodies are sold for food, prices rose 44% between 2020 and 2025.

How does this compare with compassionate plant protein? Over the same period, beans and pulses (lentils and peas) increased by 26%. And tofu had the lowest inflation, at just 15%.

Are Vegans Inflation-Proof?

We’ve known for a long time that vegans spend less on food than meat-eaters. Beans and tofu are already cheaper than meat (which makes sense because they require far less energy and other resources to produce), and they’re getting even cheaper relative to meat because of these different rates of inflation.

There are already plenty of reasons to ditch meat. Besides being environmentally unsustainable, it is the cruelest part of our economy. Billions of feeling, sentient beings—including fish, chickens, and cows—live short, unhappy lives of extreme confinement, prevented from doing the things that come naturally to them. Fish want to swim freely. Chickens would rather be pecking and scratching in the dirt, their babies scurrying around them. Cows would rather be hanging with their friends chewing their cud and taking in a pastoral view.

Instead, farmworkers force these animals into crowded, disease-ridden sheds where they cannot express their natural personalities. For many of them, the only time in their entire lives they breathe fresh air is on the way to the slaughterhouse.

These beings add up to billions of reasons not to eat meat. Now there’s this one too: every day, inflation makes compassionate vegan protein an even better bargain.