Budget a vegan meal plan.
A plant-based food budget splits into two very different streams. Per-meal ingredients — vegetables, tofu, fresh produce — scale with every meal you eat. Pantry staples such as dried lentils, rice, oats, oil, spices and nutritional yeast are bought periodically and last regardless of how many meals you cook that week, so they scale with weeks rather than meals. Separating them shows which stream to attack when the total is too high.
Two-stream food budget
Meal cost = meals per day x cost per meal x days; pantry cost = weekly staples x (days / 7); total = meal cost + pantry cost
These figures are population-average estimates for general planning only and are not medical or dietetic advice. Individual energy and nutrient needs vary widely with body composition, activity, medication and health status. Consult a qualified health professional or registered dietitian before making significant changes to what you eat, and especially if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, are under 18, or have a medical condition or a history of disordered eating.
The meal stream, because it scales with every single meal. Replacing two meat-analogue meals a week with lentil or chickpea based cooking typically drops the per-meal figure by a third, while pantry spend is already small and mostly fixed.
Because they distort a naive per-meal average. A 1 kg bag of lentils supports a dozen meals, so charging its full price to the week you bought it makes that week look expensive and the following weeks look impossibly cheap.
It depends entirely on where the protein comes from. Whole plant proteins — beans, lentils, tofu, oats — are among the cheapest calories and protein available. Packaged meat substitutes and vegan convenience food usually cost more than the meat they replace.