Black Joan

A restaurant makes more on the pasta than the steak, and the entire food system worked that out before you did. The ribeye is £42 on the menu. It cost the kitchen about £14 to put on the plate. The pasta is £18. It cost about £2.50, most of which was the parmesan. The salad is £14. It cost about £2, and the lettuce was the expensive bit. The risotto is £19. It is rice, stock and a knob of butter, and the stock was free. The steak returns twice what it cost. The pasta returns six times. The salad returns six times. So the chef's special is the pasta, the salad gets a paragraph on the menu, and the steak sits at the bottom with no adjectives. Now scale the restaurant up to a country. A box of cereal is 20p of grain and £3.50 on the shelf. A plant-based burger is pea flour, rapeseed oil and a red dye, and it sells for more than the beef one it is pretending to be. An oat drink is oats and water and sells at twice the price of the milk it replaced. Every tier of the trade makes its margin on the plant, because a plant is nearly free and an animal takes two years of grass. Bill Gates owns more farmland than any other man in America, holds stakes in the fake meat firms, and told the rich world to switch to synthetic beef. The pattern in the restaurant and the pattern in the policy are the same pattern. Talk down the expensive ingredient. Sell the cheap one at the expensive price. Keep the difference. The advice you were given about meat was written by people who make eight times more when you order the pasta. Nobody is giving you a diet. They are giving you the menu with the margins folded over.