[sleepygardener]

If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?

[bitcurious]

You’ve asked a local question globally. In my home country, meat is much more expensive than cucumbers.

In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it.

I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.

[GuB-42]

Where I live, per kg, chicken is about 5 times more expensive than cucumber.

But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.

[Cthulhu_]

It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that:

* People are willing to pay x for a pepper

* People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered

* People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken

* People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher

TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.

[rwmj]

Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed.

In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.

[sleepygardener]

YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.

[erpellan]

Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.

[freeflight]

> without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg

As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0].

Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices.

Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions.

In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried.

[0] https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch...

[sleepygardener]

Seems like central EU is a very vague term. I meant Slovakia, you probably meant Germany. I don't really low-ball the price, I checked one of the supermarkets current weekly offer, 1kg Chicken breasts (standard quality, respected manufacturer) this week 4,29 E. [0]. You might argue that this is a special offer, but we have similar offer all the time in one of the different supermarkets around. Your point with beans etc. is valid though. Just the fresh vegetables are very expensive here and feels almost like a luxury item.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/sGOCC5V

[refusenick]

subsidies