Do you have something more substantial to add? I do imagine that to match meat on a value per gram measurement, you'd have to have either spend way more or be lucky with where you live, but something to check would be great.
Meat already is one of the most overpriced foods out there if we're talking about nutritional value. If you're not buying complete trash meat that is of course.
Take for example potatoes. Dense in calories, has almost all of the nutrient groups you need and is dirt-cheap. Nutrition is a very unclear science for now, but the fact that meat has this godlike status of an apex food is definitely a product of lobbying and marketing, not facts.
It costs me about $3-7 for a single cheaper cut of steak at my local store, which according to a cursory search, probably yields 30-70g of protein. 1 potato, while very cheap, is only going to contain 2g of protein, and at most I could probably eat 3 in one go. Certainly, I'd get other vitamins and minerals from both, which is why I'd have both in the same meal. How much are you spending on meat? An occasional indulgence in that area for me would maybe be a $20 steak, or a big burger.
Sure, if you're chasing protein then potatoes aren't the best choice. Tofu is close in protein content to meat though (about 17%) and is also cheaper, if you don't go for the overpriced hippy tofu.
I don't spend anything on meat, stopped eating it a while ago. But when I did, it still wasn't breaking the bank of course, not like I was spending hundreds of dollars monthly on meat.
While meat is definitely one of the most delicious foods out there, I don't really miss it that much. The cognitive dissonance wasn't worth it.
I don't feel like you need to be chasing protein to occasionally include a cheap steak in your meal, I just picked one of the most obvious attributes of food that you need. Seems pretty reasonable if the argument was about density of value. You'd also want to get fats and proteins from nuts and so on, but preferably from things you enjoy eating and can afford so it's personally sustainable, so tofu might be off the table.
