Meatless meat is nothing new

I "care about the environment" and I will not "go meatless". I have stopped eating beef entirely and have switched to chicken and fish, with the occasional pork steak. 1 pound of beef has the carbon footprint of ~8 pounds of chicken. Especially in the States, the best thing to do is switch your meats.

Most vegetable products have a content of protein so low that the cost per protein mass is higher than for the cheaper kinds of meat, e.g. chicken meat.

The main exceptions, which can provide cheap-enough proteins, are various cereals and legumes.

While the proteins from plants are cheaper than those from meat, the difference is not huge. Where I live, in Europe, the ratio between price and protein content for wheat floor is only 3 times less than for chicken breast, while for lentils is only 2 times less than for chicken breast. For other cereals or legumes, the costs are even higher.

So, to remain cheaper than meat, the cost of protein extraction and of its further processing to make its taste and texture similar to meat must not increase the cost more than 2 or 3 times. This is not at all easy, because even bread is usually at least 2 times more expensive than the wheat floor used for it, and bread requires much simpler processing than artificial meat.

Protein extraction is simpler for the gluten of wheat, because gluten is insoluble in water, while starch is made of loosely-attached grains that can be washed away. Even so, extracting the proteins from wheat requires a lot of water and time.

Extracting the proteins from other plants is more complex and it may require the addition of various salts or solvents to the plant source, to create conditions where the proteins can be separated from the substances they are mixed with, and whatever is added must then be removed in another step of the process.

So besides the cost of the plant source, extracting the proteins has additional costs for water, chemicals and energy.

Similar additional costs are needed for transforming the proteins to have a meat-like texture and taste.

The cost of the plant source of the proteins ends being a very small fraction of the cost.

Then there is, as the other commentators have mentioned, the inefficiency of small-scale production.

The result is that I have not seen yet not only any meat substitute that is not many times more expensive than meat, but not even any kind of raw protein extracts from plants that are not many times more expensive than meat.

The only way that I have seen in which is possible to make a meat substitute that is cheaper than real meat (in Europe, i.e. where soy is too expensive as a protein source) is too make at home gluten from wheat floor (i.e. not accounting costs for water, energy and work time). Any kind of commercial product would be more expensive than real meat.

It’s maddening when people use the myth that “veganism is classist because it’s much more expensive” to justify their penchant for animal abuse because they couldn’t be more wrong.