It’s absolutely not a privilege.
I’m not entirely sure about these specific stats across different countries, but in America, since you used dollars, most vegans are women, and most of those women are women of colour, with black people in general being more than twice as likely to go vegan than any other race.
They are not privileged, they are literally members of at least two of the most discriminated against groups worldwide, and they’re also more likely to be paid less than white people and men of all races. And that being said, across the board, people are actually more likely to be vegan if they’re low income, because meat is expensive.
And if you’re disabled and poor enough to struggle with buying and making vegan food, you won’t suddenly be able to afford and make non-vegan just because it’s non-vegan. Vegan foods aren’t a trigger for those things, they’ll be issues regardless of diet.
And speaking by from personal experience, I’m a single, half-black, femme-presenting person in my early-mid twenties with debilitating mental health issues and non-debilitating chronic pain , and I’ve been vegan for 10 years (and with unsupportive, abusive parents, elaboration’ll be put here if anyone feels like reading.)
And I get what you’re saying, because tofu in the nearest store to me is about the same price, but frankly there’s no way your *only* two options are $5 worth of tofu or $5 worth of wings.
But before I get into that, tofu isn’t expensive because it’s vegan, it’s expensive because it’s a less commonly eaten Asian food. Tofu is generally more expensive than other protein sources in the same way udon noodles are generally more expensive than spaghetti, meanwhile ramen is like 39c a packet. (There’s also a lot of racism behind why it’s not commonly eaten by Americans, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Canned and dried beans, dried lentils, some nuts and seeds, and even flour if you have the ability to make seitan, are all very cheap sources of protein that you can find pretty much everywhere.
Seriously, I know there’s always a chance for something to happen at least once, but there’s no where in the world that you’ll find a store that only carries tofu and meat as their proteins as its baseline and wasn’t just cleared out by other customers.
It’s very easy to argue someone else is privileged, but by your own standards, you are just as privileged as vegans who can/are willing to buy that tofu. I mean, you have the means to store fresh and/or frozen chicken wings. Do you know how many people don’t have usable fridges and freezers, if they have them at all, because they can’t afford their electric bill and are living on shelf stable food? Do you know how many people are living out of their backpacks and don’t have coolers on hand? The seitan and dried beans aren’t the best choices because they take a lot of time to prepare, but canned beans and some types seeds/nuts are the most viable options barring allergies, and even then, you’re statistically more likely to experience homelessness than have allergies.
And speaking from personal experience on the poor front, I’ve never been homeless, when I lived alone for the first time, and lived paycheck to paycheck, my grocery bill when I lived alone, paycheck to paycheck, was about $150 a month, and then I found out that that was concerning to most people, even though I was doing perfectly fine on mostly potatoes, beans, rice, pasta, frozen and canned vegetables, and cheaper fresh fruits.
That and people got classist real fast, rice and beans are “poor people” food and people couldn’t understand how I could “live like that”. (And it came up a lot, because, like you, people think that because I’m vegan I must be well off because of how expensive they assume it is, and then most of those people could not help but comment about it.)
Also, on the not being cruelty free part, I get that too, but you can’t equate them. Agriculture is unethical across the board, but plant-based foods will always be more ethical because it’s less animal abuse and less worker abuse, because those animals have to eat too.
And on the worker abuser, because the animal abuse is self explanatory, killing field after field of plants under horrific working conditions will almost never be as traumatising as killing hundreds of animals yourself per shift under horrific working conditions.
Processing crops will never be as traumatic as skinning and dismembering hundreds of dead animals per shift, and don’t get me started on the fact that sometimes live, fully conscious but immobilised animals sometimes make it through, and people have to skin and dismember them too because company policy says they can’t stop.
Cleaning up after the harvest, processing, and packaging of crops will never be as traumatic as having to mop up gallons and gallons and gallons of animal blood on a daily basis.
Even if shit goes wrong in plant agriculture and people or animals do get injured, it’ll never come close to the level of trauma people who work in animal agriculture experience.
And I don’t say that to make it a competition or anything, but vegans and non-vegans are not on the same level here when it comes to financially support worker exploitation through their purchases.
I will say, I do agree we shouldn’t be shitting on each other because it’s not fair and is counterproductive, and that if you truly have no other choice non-vegan food doesn’t make you a bad person, but your main takes are way off base.
