Revolutionary Veganism
The revolution will be powered by tofu
buy simple ingredients in bulk. beans, rice, lentils, etc. tofu can be frozen and kept on hand for a while too. at that point you just need to get produce to finish meals. store brand products are helpful and cheaper
I've noticed recently that smaller packets can be cheaper per kg than the bigger packs so you have to check every price tag. Even the big packs with 'bulk save' or 'value pack', etc, aren't necessarily the cheapest. Scamming bastards.
That said, with dry store ingredients with long dates, when you find a good price per kg, buy loads and stock up, whether it's one big pack or a few smaller ones!
Do this across stores, too, as you might find that rice is cheaper in one while pasta is cheaper in another.
I have a 5 gal bucket that I store my rice in because I usually buy it in 20 lb bags. Lasts me a year or so.
Used to do the same for crude beans but got lazy and started buying canned because it makes it easier to make my ghetto beans and rice.
I've found that smaller local asian, Indian and Mexican stores have lots of great vegan options for much less than big name grocery stores. For example, I can get a huge bag of chili peppers for less than a jar of chili powder, and they taste 100x better. I also buy rice, beans, tofu, nutritional yeast and VWG in bulk, and I make my own seitan super cheap.
Texturized soy. Prob the most cost-effective food ever.
Starve.
I know, it’s not what you’re looking for and it’s horrible, and I also don’t mean this as a jab, but eating vegan consistently is extremely difficult with little money. Especially when I’m in the middle of a food desert and I’m closer to a nuclear power plant then I am to an actual grocery store.
In full honesty, buying in bulk used to be incredibly useful at places like Costco, and I could survive off of only going there a handful of times a year and buying metric tons of vegan food for wholesale prices.
That doesn’t exist anymore and all the prices are the same and higher. I’ve lost a lot of weight from not eating. Eating vegan is a massive privilege.
Eating healthy is privileged. It’s actually cheaper to eat healthy vegan than healthy omnivorous. Of course unhealthy and environmentally destructive stuff is extremely cheap because McDonald’s are everywhere.
Maybe US is very different from Europe, but think it depends what someone expects of food.
McDonald is not food. So it's not for comparing with real food. But even than I can not imagine potatos and peas cost more than anything in McD. less thah a pond of peas and 100ml of olive oil must be less than 5usd, add few tomatos and you have a great meal.
A small bag of potatoes costs 7-10 dollars, and fresh peas are ridiculously expensive so most people just buy frozen ones. Tomatoes are also about 50 cents/1 dollar each. Olive oil is also very expensive but can be found for relatively cheap if you look hard enough.
This isn’t possible in food deserts though. THERE IS NO FOOD other then McDonalds. Simply none. Nothing.
7-10 dollars for a small bag of potatos
Jesus fucking christ a kilogram of tatos in Poland costs like 2 to 4 zł. 💀
How much weight do you get in a "small" bag?
5 pounds is considered a small bag (if you’re not getting the fancy potatoes) and that’s about 2.3 kilos.
On sale you can get that bag around 5 dollars. Sometimes they drop to 3 dollars and I try to buy as much as I can.
Jesus that's a fortune for potatos... Especiallt considering your minimum wage and the minimum wage in Poland. It's a huge difference.
I really adhere to the philosophy that you need to shop at multiple places if you really want to save money, as different categories are cheaper at different places. Normal supermarkets are good for a lot of produce and bulk things. There are a lot of things cheap at Super King (Southern California), but not everything. You have to look at the prices and pick and choose. And I normally wouldn't have listed them a few years ago as anything budget, but Trader Joe's has had a lot of prices not go up with inflation, suddenly making some things budget over the last few years (very case by case and particular), along with always being the cheapest place to buy alcohol.
Also I would have to really up Aldi. I don't live near one anymore, but they are always very cheap. But you really have to know where you are drastically sacrificing quality versus not. And that it is not great for vegans, as most prepared meals have meat and cheese, but the produce and bread/pasta are decent and cheap.
My Aldi's has a protein bread that's got like 10g per slice and is vegan and keto friendly as actually tastes really good imo. Much more dense than regular bread and is great for sandwiches. I like to toast it and eat it with my various kinds of baked beans I make using lacto fermented beans. Good stuff.
For beans and lentils I get them in bulk from azurestandard.com if you have the space and a pickup location near you. I don’t get the organic kind because they are more expensive and imo that label is highly overrated but that my personal take that I’m not going to argue now. Just that the regular beans and lentils are cheaper and if you want a cheap supply of bulk beans they are one of the better ones I have seen.
You can also get good quality coconut oil for cheap there and palm oil shortening.
In addition to this, if you go onto the site, webstaurantstore.com you can get some deals on bulk spices, soup stocks, flours, nutrition yeast, vital wheat gluten, etc. A lot of stuff qualifies for their “plus” membership free shipping. You can get 1 month free of that membership so if you have the cash for a bulk order and the space to store you could make a big order of “plus” items using the 1 month free membership then cancel before it charges. I have several hundreds of dollars worth of stuff ready to order and waiting for me to prep the storage area in my house.
SNAP, food stamps. If you're broke/homeless/unemployed and are fortunate enough to live in a state that doesn't have strict means testing then for fucks sake, DO NOT pay for food that should be free. Otherwise, bulk section and growing my own easy greens like lettuce and Kale if that's an option, it wont solve the problem but it helps.
Mutual aid networks are also sick- if they exist in your area it makes it easy to get stuff like beans, lentils, and rice for free, but most likely you'll have to put up with a critical mass of terribly unread anarkiddies. They can be pretty insufferable sometimes, but some are also cool and open minded (I'm biased because I used to be one before dedicating 8+ months to reading Marx/Engles, Lenin/Stalin, Mao and friends), plus it beats letting the capitalists starve you. Find the MA people and get into the group chats, if you dedicate your time to a feed for your homeless neighbors, it's likely you'll also get fed.
Also if you go this route you can drip feed theory to them. Blessed ML comrades in the group chat being super chill and gentle about things until folks are ready to pick up a book.