My partner used to have the same complaints about vego food! The right recipes can be just as filling (a lot you come across incidentally may be designed to be “healthy” and therefore lower calorie). If you’re interested, “Flavour” by Yotam Ottolenghi is full of really excellent vegetarian food which is filling and isn’t very demanding on your cooking skills. But unavoidably, it does take more time to make a passable meal than a meat dish.
IDK a single telegraph cucumber here is $4-6, tomatoes anywhere from $8-16.
1kg of chicken is $12 and you get order of magnitude more calories.
Admittedly NZ had bad flooding recently hence the insane vegetable prices and you can find some cheap stuff, but it's hard. I've gone days without eating a single vegetable and feel my health going down the drain, but what can you do?
Our (2 person) grocery bill is around au$60-$70 per week which is less than half of what I hear from regular meat eaters.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/21/why-healthy-food-so-expensive...
The 2023 Farm Bill is projected to spend $700 billion over the next five years, with powerful industry lobbyists directing funds to enrich themselves at the expense of agricultural communities, human health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability.
Most Americans have never heard of this massive omnibus bill, which Congress reauthorizes every five or so years, yet it impacts us every day. It shapes our food system–from subsidizing factory farms to funding food and nutrition programs, and it is why burgers are artificially cheap and salads cost more than they should.
This is honestly what turns me off about not eating meat the most. Dude literally said he would freeze in winter and sweat in the summer and give up his firstborn and you're like "it's cheaper yay !".
It feels like a telemarketer on my phone trying to sell me something after I told them a resounding no.
Cooking nice vegetarian food is more time consuming and you do need to learn new techniques but they are just as delicious and fulfilling.
I will say there is a certain visceral feeling with eating meat off a bone which I do occasionally miss (I have been vegetarian, except when I travel, for 8 years).