Or the subsidies that hide the facts. Beef is very expensive in the sense of TCO, but not that expensive at the grocery store. See: http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/the-high-price-of-cheap-fo... for a good read on the matter.

a snip:

"The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket,” replies Pollan, “but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic."

$20 billion comes up under $100 per person per year in the US. Even giving it a generous x4 multiplier to account for the people subsidizing the industry without being consumers, at $400 per year, given the $3 and $7 prices by parent, you would need to eat under 100 pounds of meat for meat replacements to be viable. The average American allegedly consumes close to 200 pounds of meat[0] per year, so it ends up still being quote economical.

[0] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-(per...

You're making the incorrect assumption that vegetarians are replacing whatever meat they were eating with the more-expensive meat substitutes. As I noted in my comment above, there are plenty of meat substitutes and alternatives that are much cheaper than $7/lb.

Sure if you're willing to exclude the externalities. What's the societal cost of antibiotic resistant escherichia coli?

The US is fixing that problem. Starting December 2016, a vet must examine and prescribe antibiotics for each animal; it will no longer be allowable to preemptively dose an entire herd just to enhance production.

http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/DevelopmentApprovalProce...

Obviously it doesn't fix it for China though, which is where a lot of the drug-resistant bugs are coming from...

That's encouraging. I hope that regulation will have teeth.

Which is also the case for coal, which makes the original comparison very apt, though I'm not sure if that was intended.

You can't just compare to ground beef though. Plenty of meat and cheese products are the same price or more than equivalent meat alternatives.

[Aside: Actually, it's kind of interesting to consider that meat alternatives top out at a relatively low price point, whereas meat, fish, etc can get really expensive.]

Just like in the meat market, there are cheaper and more expensive meat alternatives. Compare tofu at ~$2/lb vs Field Roast at ~$6/lb, where Field Roast is more toward the gourmet end of the non-meat spectrum.

I would think that if you're not a meat eater, tofu is your ground beef equivalent. Or maybe beans, lentils, quinoa, etc, which are also pretty cheap.

Also, home made seitan is super cheap and much easier to produce than home made meat.

Cheese also has no upper price limit.

You can pay a lot for plant-based food, but that's much more of a niche interest.

Pork is even cheaper, for some reason. I've been buying boneless pork chops for something like $1 - $1.50 /pound for years from Market Basket stores.

Pigs are very cheap to raise, they'll happily get to slaughter weight quickly on "waste" foods. They don't need lots of land and they provide lots of meat for their relative size.

With the surge of popularity of bacon, there are a lot of pigs being brought to market. Any part of the pig that isn't bacon ends up being cheap because supply/demand.

History lesson: lard pigs used to be much more popular to raise than meat pigs. I wonder whether they'll see a comeback.

(After only half a minute of Googling: http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2015/06/11/lard-vs-bacon-pigs/ )

I wonder if Asia might be a good target market. Beef (particularly imported beef) costs a lot more in Asia.

Yes, but AFAIK being able to afford meat products (or whole animals for food) is more prestigious esp. in China than in the Western world.