You deserve worse. Keep asking the broke government for more free stuff, and then when they print more money, make a pikatchu face on the prices shooting up with even more inflation.
Where I live it would cost at least twice that. The veggie burgers would be about $12 per pack of two, buns would be around $9 (but only come in a 4 pack) and the Danish would probably be $8 or $9.
Real beef is still way cheaper. A pack of probably 15 patties is around $40.
I live in Alaska. Frozen stuff is a premium. And otherwise prices are all over the place, and supply depends on what came on the barge.
only place i can possibly see frozen being premium is like, rural africa? and even then i’d assume it’s sufficiently beneficial and cheap to go to the extra effort to set up supply chains for it even in really remote areas.
They are owned by two companies that happen to be called Aldi, but they aren’t the same company. I think Aldi was started by two brothers who had a fight and split in 2. So the two Aldis are legally separate companies
If there weren’t price tags in the pic I would have guessed this would be $25-$30. This type of convenient food, none the less fancier versions of convenient foods, are expensive. Go figure.
If “proper shopping” is buying cheap and healthy food then yeah OP you suck at it.
Fancy brioche buns, not normal burger buns. Brioche is typically the most expensive bread off the shelf.
Fancy veggie burgers, of course they are expensive lol, that’s fancy vegan stuff
Don’t pretend that is a Danish singular. That’s a huge fuckin Danish, that’s the equivalent of 4 Danishes easily lol
I hate when people buy fancy bespoke food and are like “why do my gluten free vegan free range burgers cost so much?”
If you want to be vegetarian/vegan, go buy normal vegis, don’t complain about your super fancy “takes a bunch of extra work and has very low demand” food being expensive.
You miss the point. Food should not even cost this much. Even crappier “normal” food costs too much yet is still unhealthy. And OP could have specific food needs, you don’t know. So why should he have to pay more for a basic need.
OP spent $19 to feed four people a veggie burger on a brioche bun, and a pretty good sized piece of cake in the shape of a Danish… Like half a square foot of the stuff.
While not cheap overall, each person is eating for less than $5. And they’re eating better than you could taking that $5 to any rte food store.
I get a sack of rice, a couple avocados, dry beans, frozen broccoli and corn, lime or two, bunch of spices if you don’t already have. Whatever Mexican spices recipe online but definitely get smoked paprika it’s straight up drugs. This will cost more than the burger set in the picture but it makes more meals.
Instant pot rice, instant pot seasoned beans with a second inner pot, 1/8 of tall wide mouth mason jar each of rice and beans, arbitrary amount of broc corn and cubed avocado leaving about 1/8 of jar as air, tablespoon or so of lime juice. Cool the jars and freeze once cool. I use plastic lid rings with silicone insert since the metal ones get rusty when used like this. I’ll prep like 40 of these in one session but that’s definitely using a bigger budget so I don’t have to do it as often.
My recommended rice is long grain brown with about 1/16 to 1/8 of the amount cooked being wild rice mixed in. They both take the same amount of time to cook when mixed, but it’s a decent amount longer than white rice. I usually put an arbitrary splash of sake or gin in the water for cooking the rice but it’s largely a habit from copying grandpa.
I take a frozen jar to work with me in a lunch bag and it doubles as an ice pack for whatever else I want in there. I aim for it to be thawed enough to shake it and mix it before microwaving. For at home I thaw it in the fridge the day before. When I didn’t have a microwave I just steamed the whole jar in the instant pot.
Jars and instant pot + accessories were all things I waited for sales on. It can be done without instant pot but it’s probably the safest way I can think of to cook things and fuck off without worrying about it burning the house down. Jars are merely the cheapest I could find in decent quantity and dishwasher safe.
This is probably the cheapest with highest output volume food option I batch prep. I also do things like potato leek and/or squash soup, or potato cheese and soy bacon soup (I’m not actually vegetarian or vegan but it’s a real pain cooking all the bacon needed and cutting meat is tiresome), and some other stuff that has been hit or miss that I only tried once. I keep them all in a chest freezer and I take out whatever I feel like eating as an easy microwave meal, unless I’m running low and need to reserve them for work lunches.
Lol I’m actually Canadian and prefer metric, but these jars have weird and inconsistent volume so I just eyeball everything and the last one that has a different amount from the others is the one I eat on the spot.
Man, you said it jokingly and I truly chuckled but more and more the frugal community turns into that for the simplest things like, I don’t know:
OP: I love my Dr. Browns cherry diet soda brings as it’s my little piece of heaven and sincerely would like to find alternatives as is crazy expensive compared to cherry vanilla Dr. Pepper, that doesn’t taste as well, what can a dude do to get ahead of this?
Community : I’ve started bartering homemade syrups with neighbors for other home-grown or homemade items. It’s a fun community-building activity and we all save money, you just need to grow organic non GMO crops of cherry or other fruits and gather for harvest once a year to get the sugar cane and fruits to make the syrup.
Community 2: I’ve recently scouted all 223 bodegas supermarkets and drink emporiums in my town and took note of the price of individual cans, next week I’m going to the distributor to place an order equivalent to a sizeable amount of all cans on display to corner the market and resell the cans I have at an exuberant markup that will cover my habit and imagine all that I’m saving by buying in bulk!
I think the other side that doesn’t get explored very often is how convenience food makers have gotten everybody hooked and unable to cook anymore.
Now that that is generally locked-in behavior in our society, the price goes through the roof.
I know people that literally do not know how to make rice because it’s “too hard”.
We should acknowledge that grocery prices have gone up in that price-gouging is rampant. We should also acknowledge that most of people’s money spent at the grocery store is to exchange hundreds of dollars of extra money, for minutes less preparation.
In this picture of this person paid $10 for a pound of “burger”. A pound of ground beef or tofu is a third that price. It takes a minute to slap a couple patties together or to slice off a few slabs, dry them and fry them.
I really feel like we need to enhance this conversation. I think a lot of people don’t want to have it because they want to have the convenience but not the price and it’s just not sustainable anymore. I think people need to look at their own dietary lifestyle, and consider what they’re trading for that convenience.
I agree with you for the most part but a pound of ground beef for under 4 bucks?! Where I live it’s rarely less than $8 lb, but definitely a high cost area. Even chicken is usually more than $6 per lb now.
Even a damn tomato or onion is more than a dollar these days and bell peppers are $2 each!
It’s only really fair to compare when you consider the price at OPs store.
Myself, I’m looking at the cost of the burger patties and I know that in my region the price of 1 lb of ground beef relative to this convenient product would be 1/3rd
Yes, but also this isn’t strictly a case of “convenience food makes price go up.” OP is making veggie burgers, not beef burgers, so you really should be comparing “Gardein pre-packaged veggie patties” to “black beans + brown rice + bell pepper + onion + mushroom + eggs + chili powder + cumin + bread crumbs etc” that you’ll mash into your version of a DIY veggie patty. The pre-packaged ones will still probably be more expensive, but at least you’ll be comparing apples to apples.
Yes, it “is” a case of convenience foods make the price go up.
Obviously I was not comparing apples to apples because I chose beef as the comparison which is vastly more expensive than the constituent ingredients of the prepackaged food.
I can make those burgers myself for about 1 to 2 dollars of the veggie/legume/rice ingredients so let’s get real here.
I’m just not sure what we’re all arguing about any more. We all largely agree with one another, but the comments in this thread are all over the place
Are we trying to make an argument against the outrageous price of pre-packaged food (which we all agree have gotten out of hand)? If so, we should be comparing frozen veggie patties against their non-pre-packaged counterparts, not against beef or sandwich bread or whatever else people keep bringing up in the comments.
Are we trying to argue that OP is dumb for picking the most expensive options on the shelf if they’re going to complain about price? Because yeah, everyone already knows that a 70% lean turkey burger on Wonder Bread is going to be cheaper than Kobe beef on an artisanal brioche bun with truffle butter. Veggie burgers have always been expensive because they required years of R&D to make them palatable since they have to survive the freeze & thaw, sit on the shelf for months, and be viable as a boxed product (unlike our home-made versions). What’s worse, they’re still niche enough that they don’t benefit from economies of scale. It’s old news.
Are we trying to argue that inflation is going nuts right now (which we also already agree on)? Because if so, OP picked a dumb collection of ingredients to make that point since I doubt many people have an instinctive feel for how much Gardein used to charge. Show us the price for beef & bargain buns today, then compare that to what a burger used to cost and then we’ll talk.
My point was just that if you’re arguing the first one, then actually pick comparable ingredients for your comparison instead of beef.
A pound of ground beef or tofu is a third that price.
I understand what you’re trying to say here. But I just wanted to add, making a vegetarian/vegan burger is not as simple as grinding up a pound of tofu and sticking it together to fry in a pan. I’m not saying you have to buy some of the “no meat” brand burgers to make a nice vegan patty but simply substituting some meat with natural unprepared tofu and expecting a great tasting result is IMHO where a lot of people get their aversion to tofu (and often derived to all meat alternatives) from. (Source 15years of vegetarian eating and cooking) The fact that ready made vegan patties exist and taste great these days is awesome for someone like me who sometimes just wants to make a stupid simple tasty burger.
Tl;dr: Tasty vegan patties aren’t that simple.
I agree that people should be encouraged to cook more (I love doing it when I have time and it hits me). But simply declaring “nobody can cook anymore” and demanding people that might not have the time to prepare a home cooked meal in between their first and second job is not helping.
Of course the convenience of fast food and ready made meals is one of these classic situations where an “invention” that makes our life simpler and more convenient is a good reason why we don’t need all that time we save to ourselves anymore. i.e. you don’t need a lunch break when you can just microwave something up and eat it while continuing your work.
Sorry got kind of a long winded bit here. Hope it makes sense
How about a different angle; enjoy the veggies as they are and forget the emulated meat puck. This isn’t a dig at you, just a general statement of how I always found it weird there are so many vegetarian and vegan food tring to emulate a meat stick or patty. Veggies are wonderful all by themselves why not enjoy them for what they are instead of competing with something it’s not. My 2 cents.
The point is that you spent 2+ decades of life eating meat focused and centered meals, and “just dont eat the meals you spent your whole life enjoying!” isnt actually a coherent or actionable thought for normal people.
If I had to cut flour out of my diet, Im going to look for good tortilla alternatives like corn. Im not going to shrug and never eat tacos, burritos, and other meals Ive known my whole life.
You know how people put spices on meat because they want it to taste more like plants?
sometimes people want to put spices on vegetable protein in order to make it taste more like meat, or fill a similar role in a dish.
People who avoid meat because killing pointlessly is wrong don’t hate the taste. It’s as weird as being like “people on a diet shouldn’t make healthy desserts, they should appreciate low calorie veggie bowls for what they are”
For comparison I was in Germany recently and to a supermarket, 6 half liter beers (variety of em too), nice bottle of wine, cheese, crackers, salami and some dessert type chocolate crackers…$20.
Germany is actually well known for having very low grocery price
English language article that mentions this though the main subject of the article are the " true price of groceries including climate costs: www.dw.com/en/…/a-38976477)
This is largely done by price dumping the suppliers and low balling the workforce (as much as German labor laws allow) <- I’m aware I have no source for this I will try to dig one up tomorrow when I can
I didn’t know that! Along the roads though there were a lot of Apple trees and my friend I was visiting said that’s commonly a thing to plant them along roads there so that no matter the situation someone can have access to food…I really liked that!
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