"EVERYONE can be vegan."

As much as I roll my eyeballs when my middle-class acquaintances say that being vegan is expensive, what I can't stand even more is when vegans say "Being vegan is cheap, everyone can be vegan and not being able to afford vegan lifestyle is a lame excuse." When it's said as a retort to people who actually use it as an excuse, at least there's a context, but more often than not, it isn't.

Also, that argument is usually followed by the 'fact' that 'rice and beans' are dirt cheap. First of all, that's not even factual. In South Korea, legumes usually cost just as much, if not more, as cheap pork. I don't know how that's even possible, but they are. Rice is grown in tropical or subtropical regions, so in colder countries it may not be as accessible as people think. But more importantly, rice and beans may not be feasible food options for everyone. As I will explain later, some people don't have access to stores where rice and beans are sold or to the facility required to cook them. Rice and beans (and most other foods that have decent price/calorie ratio) are inedible uncooked. Why does it matter that rice and beans are cheap if you can't eat them? If you live in urban food desert, you'll have to eat junk food anyways.

Food desert is a real problem, and I am flabbergasted that there are so many people who have no concept of it.  Urban food deserts are filled with bodegas and fast food joints, but their level of access to produce is marginal at best. People are actually forced to eat unhealthy food. Produce access depends greatly on the neighborhood, and if you don't have transportation, it's going to be impossible to get groceries. I have first hand experience with it. I now live in a nice, gated apartment complex. There are 2 more apartment complexes just like this in the immediate proximity. I have 2 huge corporate supermarkets, 3 smaller corporate supermarkets, 3 co-op type grocery stores, and 1 small business grocery store within the walking distance. Before I graduated middle school, we lived on the other side of the same electoral district. It was a sketchy area. It was 1km apart from a cluster of brothels and as a result, the area was filled with seedy motels. There were 4 motels side-by-side right behind my home. There was a 'market' that closes early and doesn't even open on weekends. If you have a job, you can't shop there. Besides, they have no store policy or anything. It's the kind of place where if you know what you're doing you're fine, but if you don't know what you're doing, they will rip you off so, so hard because there's no set price and they will charge you based on how gullible you look. Since that was our only option in the area, my mother drove up to the area we live now for grocery shopping. After I moved away a small corporate grocery store was established, but the selections are overpriced and quite limited. In fact, they don't have rice and beans. You still have to come all the way up here to my town to get enough produce to sustain a balanced diet, and it's too far to walk while lugging heavy grocery bags.

I would like to quote a paragraph from The Atlantic article by Barbara Ehrenrich,It Is Expensive to Be Poor. The article isn't about veganism but this particular paragraph is very relevant to my point.

I was also dismayed to find that in some ways, it is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

"Silly poor people, if they would just go to the grocery store that they can't get to and buy some rice they can't cook, it would be so much cheaper." This does not make sense at all. People who go on and on about how 'affordable' being vegan is neglect the fact that they are able to live that cheap lifestyle because they are not that poor. Rice and beans may not be expensive, but what makes eating rice and beans feasible (i. e. a residence with kitchen and access to grocery stores) is not affordable for everyone. Saying that everyone can be vegan removes those who can't from 'everyone' as if they are some kind of subhumans, and conceals very serious problems like nutrition inequality.

Why can't we acknowledge these problems and work together to fix them instead of marginalizing poor people and avoiding the real issues? Invalidating and dismissing these problems won't do anyone, human or nonhuman, any service.