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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

It is likely that in the near future I will return to eating a moderate amount of chicken meat, after I will finish my reserves of whey protein concentrate, which were bought a long time ago, when it was cheap.

Most plant protein concentrates are not an acceptable substitute for meat, because their very high prices make obvious that their production is less efficient than that of meat, i.e. it requires a lot of extra energy and chemical reagents.

More than half of my protein intake comes from plant sources like lentils and wheat, but I cannot raise that percentage to 100%, because I gain weight immediately.

Fortunately, I do not have any problem with gluten, so I can enjoy bread that I bake at home, which is tasty and which has a negligible cost per protein content.

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Farming is not an open and free market. You cannot draw any conclusions about actual costs and impact from retail pricing. Subsidies distort cost massively.

I'm also from the EU, and the plant protein mix in the shop I buy from is less than half the price of the whey protein, about 13 EUR per kg. Interestingly, casein doesn't seem to have increased in price nearly as much as whey protein did.

Actually you are right.

I have now searched again what kind of protein powders are available, and the situation has changed a lot in comparison with a couple of years ago, when I last did an exhaustive search.

While milk protein concentrate and especially whey protein concentrate have become much more expensive, so I stopped buying them, the prices of soy protein isolate and of pea protein isolate have decreased several times and now I can find both of them around me at a price of about 16 EUR/kg, so I have ordered one bag of each, to test them.

The only thing that annoys me is that it is exceedingly difficult to find pure unflavored protein powders. I do not want any vanilla/chocolate etc. flavors, because I want to be able to add them to whatever food I want, in which case the taste would be much better than when using them for a protein shake.

Of the 2 plant protein powders that I have ordered for testing, 1 is flavored, but I hope that the other is unflavored, though when buying from online shops you can never be 100% certain of what you have bought until you open the package.

When comparing the prices per protein content of plant protein, like soy protein or pea protein with the prices of whey protein, milk protein or eggwhite protein, one should keep in mind that the prices of plant protein powders divided by their protein content must be increased by about 10%, because unlike for the animal proteins their digestibility is only around 90%.

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