Absolutely, this study from Berkeley from 2014 said beef should be $30 / lb, without subsidies. Inflation-adjusted (with caveats), it'd be ~$40 / lb today.

How much is Tofu? Thats always a good cheap option if fresh veg isnt affordable

Was gonna say, I remember when I though 5 bucks was a lot, and I was probably like 8 or 10.

Not sure what you mean, so gonna just shotgun approach my response and maybe one of the things are somehow relevant.

By "toddler", I meant like sometime between infant and kindergarten. Idk the actual age.

I was young enough to not remember, so I just don't know what it was. Just that it was a lot.

I was a stubborn eater. My mom also tried other things like not letting me other things until I tried something new. But found my tolerance for starving myself was more than their tolerance for me staving. I lost some absurd about of weight (like 10lbs per week) for a few weeks straight over being a picky eater in 2nd grade (that was not my mom's doing nor was it intentional).

Seriously, I just discovered impossible nuggets. They are hands down better than meat nuggets.

Oh potatoes and rice go in more than half of what I eat, a lot of cababge too. My point is less about meat specifically and more that based on where you live a vegan diet may or may not be the more affordable option. A lot of us just end up on the 'whatevers on sale' diet.

Any Brands you recommend?

As generally used, "overhead" doesn't address the topic with a degree of granularity that takes the difficulty of preparation into account. It simply means the operating expenses associated with the business - wages, facilities and utilities are by far the three largest aspects, raw materials, consumables and related equipment costs are (depending on the industry) anywhere from a minor line item to little more than a rounding error. This is true for essentially every industry you care to name (I actually can't think of an exception. Maybe NFTs or some related crypto nonsense? Though even those famously have to factor in utilities).

TL;GTTP: The type of food you're preparing matters comically less than where your restaurant is located and the size of your staff.

Sorry but... no, my point absolutely stands. I'm just pulling my data from HappyCow and TripAdvisor, but Jamaica has way more than thirty vegan restaurants. 141 that have enough of an internet presence that I can find them before this hangover forced me to stop looking. Happycow has an extremely convenient breakdown by area, too, which shows the regional concentration of veggie/vegan restaurants. And, if you do the math, ~90% of them are in high population density coastal towns with heavily tourism-dependent economies, which is what I'd expect to find (I didn't control for the obvious potential sampling bias, but it's a small enough country we can probably assume we're working with a population here). "Specialty" restaurants, which category unfortunately vegan/veggie venues fall into in the western meme, are even more at risk of failing than the average due to the restricted market appeal, and so require a larger population (and economic base) to support them.

I feel like my comment has touched a nerve with people due to my own inelegance while stating my point. I'm not saying that eating morally has a fee associated with it, I'm well aware of how much cheaper it can be to eat a veggie-heavy or full vegan diet. I am saying that dining out has fees associated with it, and that the cost of dining out has very little to do with the price of the ingredients (even for perceived 'luxury' meals like in steakhouses or hotpot) and almost everything to do with the operational overhead of running a restaurant (wages, facilities, utilities). Vegetarian dishes at mixed meat/veggie locations are a 'money maker' for the restaurant, because those dishes can be priced similarly to more-expensive ones but cost less to produce. But even that expanded profit margin is always going to be a much smaller percentage than the base cost of the meal, which is defined by the aforesaid overhead.

I'm quite sorry that I didn't make that clearer in my initial drunken 3am comment!

Happycow breakdown