Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimg or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to avoid meat.
Meat's convenient in a way that vegetables aren't.
Veggies are less effort: peel some, chop into suitably sized bits. To compare like with like compare with pre-sliced and peeled veggies, or animal carcass before skinning and butchering. :)
Something like a rosti with cheese or added spinach or cabbage is cooked meat speed fast and tasty, as are a whole host of the traditional leftovers recipes that grew up to use up spuds, carrots, cabbage etc next day.
Are you treating your vegetables like wagyu beef and giving them massages or something? If not, aside from a quick wash, cooking vegetables is no more difficult than cooking meat. Sautee them, bake them, pan fry, deep fry, air fry, broil, steam, sous vide, etc...
Meat on the other hand is greatly benefited by things like marination, mechanical tenderizing, monitoring temperature as it cooks. You can whip up a steak pretty quick, but probably not any faster than you could stir fry some veggies.
Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
Peanut butter celery sticks would be a better example I think.
There are so many variables it's hard to say anything concrete, but on average I'd bet people spend less active time preparing vegetables to eat than meat.
Maybe with very thin, low quality grocery store steaks. When I eat meat I buy steaks from a butcher that are over an inch thick, and require 5-7 minutes minimum per side for medium rare. Sometimes even more for thicker cuts
>prep is less than a minute. Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
A lot of people think vegetables are difficult because they don't have knife skills so it takes multiple minutes to cut a piece of produce. With practice, prep for cooking vegetables should be just as fast. Also, even if it does take an extra couple minutes of my time, its worth it for my own health and morals by not supporting industrialized farming
Why does eating meat mean you can cook less?