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amey
frankenbike
I certainly agree that eating vegan is cheaper if you know what to do (e.g., cook from scratch every time), you have the time and leisure to do it, etc.
Many people's food habits are very different, though. Take the recent 'vegan junk food' thing. This is obviously intended to change the image of veganism, emancipate it (in that funny way), make it less po-faced, virtuous, or 'health-conscious', and is great as far as it goes and achieves those objectives--but the stuff these small traders currently produce, tasty though it is, is roughly 2-3 times more expensive than a £2 box of bits of chicken corpse from the ubiquitous
schicken schop-excuse my accent--chicken shop. I'm sure something similar is true of ready meals from the freezer and things like that (although as I never buy them, I wouldn't know).In a sense, it's not vegan prices that are high but omnivorous prices that are much too low (the squeeze put on farmers by supermarket chains), which is in turn used to depress people's wages (after all, they can buy all that cheap shit food and at least survive on much less money, even if their life expectancy goes down).
I wouldn't agree with amey that veganism is a 'privilege'--I know people who have successfully been vegan on very low incomes--, but I agree with him that there are societal trends that at least make it at best aspirational for many people. It's a case of the ever-widening circles of cultural practices. If said practices become more popular, this at the same time lowers the bar to entry in all sorts of ways that hadn't previously been considered possible.