As they scale up, the costs will be lower. It’s a supply chain thing, not a fundamental limitation. The input costs are lower. In the broader sense, plant-based diets from whole-foods are actually already cheaper

It found that in high-income countries:

• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.

• Vegetarian diets were a close second.

• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.

• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study

This is also true in real spending data

Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed

https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9

Compared to meat eaters, results show that “true” vegetarians do indeed report lower food expenditures

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via=ihub (looking at the US)

EDIT: I should also note that in an increasing list of countries, non-whole plant-based things like this are already cheaper too. With meat prices rising further, that’s only likely to increase more

I should note that technology is increasingly helping provide more options. With precision fermentation, there is a lot of ways to biologically identical proteins, enzymes, etc. For instance, you can now buy non-animal whey protein, egg white protein, non-animal heme iron, and more in the stores. It’s super cool stuff and ironically the dairy industry was a big pioneer of it in the 90s for one of the enzymes they use widely in cheese. There’s a lot more coming down the pipeline with it

The BBC has a good article on this concept

The tension that results can make us feel stressed, irritated, and unhappy. But instead of resolving it by changing our beliefs or behaviour, it’s quite normal to blame these feelings on something else entirely – all without realising we’re doing it

In the case of eating meat, Rothgerber suggests we have a number of strategies – around 15 – which allow us to avoid facing up to the meat paradox. These include pretending that meat has no link to animals, imagining that we eat less of it than we really do, wilful ignorance about how it’s produced

[…]

Unfortunately, most of these are derailed by the presence of vegans.

According to Rothgerber, people tend not to think of meat eating as an ideology. The dominance of meat eating around the world helps the omnivores among us to avoid the idea that it’s a choice – it’s just what everyone else is doing. But when a vegan turns up at a dinner party, suddenly we’re bumped out of the comfortable “mainstream diet” category and into the unsettling “meat-eating” category. By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance. And this makes people angry.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200203-the-hidden-biases-that-drive-anti-vegan-hatred