There's no way it's more expensive in a free (with externalities priced-in) market. Meat eats plants in a very lossy fashion. The main problem for your average

There's no way it's more expensive in a free (with externalities priced-in) market. Meat eats plants in a very lossy fashion. The main problem for your average Joe is that it's quite hard to get started cooking tasty meals this way. I've tried many times and I can kinda manage with these frozen "patties" and such but it's just hard to flip thousands of years of cooking tradition. You can tell when you have some Ethiopian or Indian veggie food that it's been honed to perfection over centuries. Where I'm from all the dishes include meat or animal fat/broth which is honestly even harder to replace than the protein. When you go from chicken broth or bacon fat to a vegetable broth or coconut butter, it's just a jump too far to make the dish still make any sense and that's the kind of moments where most people give up.