@BewareTheBeardedDragon
You are talking about vegetarian diets which can still include a degree of animal cruelty if from dubious sources. And nobody is saying people need to eat meat...but people in poverty are allowed that choice too .
They are - but it's still a choice, and what I said equally applies to vegan food.
Fwiw - I have been on a very low income having to feed picky children on a very low budget.
Also - there are choices which vegetarians can make about the welfare of animals producing dairy or eggs that they eat as well. I only buy organic animal products now, and I sincerely hope this means that they are not living shitty horrible lives while producing stuff that I eat. And I spend less buying organic milk, cheese, eggs than I did when I bought non organic and also meat products.
Scrowy what you describe re.using cheap cuts from good sources sounds great and all the TV chefs go on about it, but I was always frustrated to find when trying to follow their "money saving" advice at the supermarket was impossible - even if they had the cuts they weren't cheap as the TV chefs had lead me to believe they would be. What you say makes so much sense.
The trouble with TV chefs going on about buying cheap cuts is that it instantly resulted in a massive increase in price for those cheap cuts. By talking about them, they caused the rise in demand and huge increase in cost.
For example, skirt steak, eight years ago, was cheaper than stewing steak. Now sold as bavettes. Lamb neck fillet - was about £3 a piece - now it's super expensive. Pork loin fillet - five years ago, I paid £4.50 for organic/free range/outdoor reared and you could get non-organic for £3.20ish. Now they're a tenner each. A small gammon joint was around £4 right up to just before Christmas even in 2018. They're currently a tenner this year. Even lamb shanks were super cheap and, whilst I'm going back another ten years to 2005, I could buy four for about £4.50 (they were around £8 each in pubs). If you can get them, rather than their all going into high cost microwave meals, they're massively more expensive and the cheaper ones are now more likely to be forelegs.
Every single one of these cheaper items were fine until the very second a TV chef said 'why don't you eat these?'. Which is also exactly what happened with fish/seafood - Guernard is brilliant and cost bugger all, Pollock was a quarter if not less of the price of other white fish - except Coley. That was for cats in a lot of people's minds, so was practically pennies. Even fruit and vegetables went from cheap to aspirational - Rhubarb, Kohl Rabi, Kale and Celeriac aren't super delicate, practically gold plated veggies. Fucking cauliflower - cheapest of the cheap ten years ago. Now look at the price.
When I'm working, I don't get anywhere near a butcher during opening hours and I'm certainly not trusting an £80 Riverford organics meat & veg box to still be in the front garden nine hours after I left the house.
It's all very well saying Eat Less of It But More Expensive. But if it's already your only meat based meat of the week, going from £6 to £21 is not a reasonable expectation.
And no, going vegetarian/vegan isn't something to be enforced upon people - oh, you're poor, so you don't get to have meat or fish - that's for rich people, not the likes of you - or 'well, you're poor and I don't approve of anybody having animal products, so I don't care, you can eat potatoes' is what people hear.
I make the choices I can afford. I know what the worst of the conditions are and I know what the better conditions involve. I know what slaughtering/processing involves. I know what it involved long before livestock had to be transported miles for slaughter.
Don't patronise me or others by assuming that everybody is too stupid to know.