You literally have the most expensive possible options for every single one of those

Buying prepared food is expensive.

It’s so sad how many posters would rather blame OP for spending an extra dollar on better bread and veggie patties rather than actually acknowledge the blatant price gouging on food. The idea that everyone should only be buying the cheapest ingredients is just stupid. No one is living a fulfilling life eating nothing but cheap beans and rice everyday, and food prices have been ridiculous for a while now.

Artisan brioche buns. Plant based burgers are more expensive then the real thing for some reason (and full of salt). That Danish is a ripoff.

That’s relatively cheap…

You’ve got 8 buns there so buying 4 more patties would take the whole thing to $28 for 8 burgers and cutting the danish into 8 slices which is probably the serving size anyway. Or $3.50 per burger and slice of danish.

And you grabbed the most expensive versions of things too.

Well, those are some fancy burgers… Worth the money if you have it, IMO, but not something I’d buy on a budget. I usually get the Morningstar Farms chipotle black bean burgers, which Costco sells in a big box for a good price. They aren’t trying to be indistinguishable from meat (which isn’t a priority for me anyway) but they’re greasy (in a good way) and delicious.

Plus the Morningstar burgers have the rare advantage of being microwaveable. (I suppose you can technically microwave anything, but they’re good after being microwaved.) I’m not just saying that because I’m lazy - I have a little electric grill I can use, but I don’t need to for them and it’s nice to save a little bit of time that way.

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.

That is kind of what you get when you buy super processed foods. If you want to save money you have to buy low processed foods. For example, you can get a 3lb bag of apples ($5), 5 cans of beans ($5), 2lb carrots ($2), 5 lbs Potatoes ($5) for the same price.

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.

Meanwhile at Aldi, veggie burgers $3, brioche buns $4, family sized Danish $4.

Yeah, it’s your shopping.

I’m in Vietnam having a peek about. Just ate a light, 4 course meal with beers for two for about usd $6… It was incredible.

The world is indeed out of balance.

I’m so used to NYC food prices that $20 for four meals seems like a steal

That’s about 5 a burger. While it isn’t exactly a good price, it isn’t out of scale. A good veggie burger is highly processed, it has to be or it won’t hold together, nor taste right.

Seriously, try and whip up your own version some time. It’s labor intensive. Even if that labor is done by machine, that factors into pricing compared to a meat burger (which is still a good bit of processing, just less complicated).

They absolutely should cost less, I’m not denying that. But it isn’t out of scale with what highly processed foods cost. They should all cost less, but that’s a separate thing.

Besides, you know anything vegetarian or vegan is going to be priced higher just because is a niche product. They know they can get away with it; if a vegetarian is buying that kind of thing, they’re obviously not willing to do the work it takes to do it themselves (and it is a lot of work to make a good veggie burger at home).

And, if you want something other than fast food burgers, it isn’t like a meat burger is any less than that. So, again, the scale isn’t that bad.

Edit: I missed the danish in the pic. That’s a quarter of the price total by itself. Which means that the entire group is priced normally compared to what I see in stores. And, you’re down to about 3 a burger, which is also a decent price compared to the ultimate stuff when you get it from a restaurant. Again, I still agree that food shouldn’t cost that much, but you would have trouble getting your per burger price below that if you made your own.

If you had bought normal store brand buns instead of artisan brioche, they are a third of the price. You are paying 2.50 per veggie burger pattie instead of a bit more or less than a dollar per pattie in morning star and great value brands. 5 dollars for a Danish that size is not ludicrous, but I bet you could have shopped around better for that too. You could have cut the total price in half at least if you were paying attention to prices and brands. Not saying that prices aren’t getting out of hand, but it doesn’t look like you even tried.

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.