3 ms·

I'm not vegan, but in most places in Europe lentils are really cheap (2.50€/kg)

• adrian_b 2y ago
  Lentils are a good source of proteins and are about twice cheaper than the cheapest meat, but like any non-processed vegetables they have a too high ratio between energy and protein content. For a sedentary life style it is impossible to compose a vegan diet that has enough proteins without containing too much energy. It is necessary to use at least one protein source where a special method has been used to separate the proteins from the rest of the vegetable. There are plenty of such products on the market, like tofu and various protein extracts, but all of them are much more expensive than chicken meat. At the tofu price mentioned by another poster it is 2.5 times more expensive than chicken breast, while other kinds of protein extracts that I have seen around are 5 times more expensive than chicken breast. The discussion was strictly about how to get vegan proteins cheaper than meat. When you are willing to pay many times more than for meat, then of course it is trivial to eat a vegan diet. Because all commercial products are more expensive than meat, the only other way is to extract vegetable protein at home. I am aware of only a single source of vegetable proteins where the proteins can be separated without any special equipment or chemicals (excluding soy, which is expensive in Europe), and that is wheat flour, from which the gluten can be separated from starch by simple washing.