Why cheese costs more than meat?

I always wondered about this. With meat, you have to deal with animals, some of them grow very slow and you have to keep feeding them,etc. Although making cheese is a complicated process but mostly it just costs time, but not really energy or other input.

So why the average meat is cheaper than the average cheese???

 

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I have wondered about that also. I haven't got a clue.

 

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The labor involved in cheese and the aging is what brings it up. Consider, all you have is the milk to produce the cheese and a significant amount of labor afterwords.

~String

 

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In order to make cheese, you have to do all the work of raising meat - and then the work has just begun.

Once the cow has made meat from grass, the next step in eating the meat is fairly quick and simple. A cow making milk from grass has just begun the cheese making.

Milk, the more relevant comparison, does cost about the same or a little less than meat.

 

I am not sure how much labor is involved, but the per hour labor might be not very costly. The aging costs time, not money. After all there is lots of labor cost with creating the meat too....

Maybe iceaura is right that you have to start out with milk, and that can be costly, although I don't know how much milk is needed for 1 lb of cheese.

Edit: I looked up cheese making and it takes lots of milk:

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese_5_gallons/CHEESE_5gal_00.htm

" I usually make 5 gallons of milk into cheese at a time in a 5 gallon Volrath stainless steel pot. Five gallons of milk produces a 5-6 pound wheel of cheese ."

So about 1 gallon of milk makes 1 lb cheese. Thus right at the start you have a $3.5 or so cost of the gallon of milk. For comparison, 1 lb of ground beef is $2.3. Now 1 lb of cheese is usually not cheaper than $6 and it goes way up from there...

 

Compare processed milk - cheese - with similarly processed meat - jerky, fancy cured ham, etc.

Time is money. So is uncertainty, skill, and controlled environments.

 

Yeah, I'd agree. To make milk you first need to make meat. So milk is post-meat production.

 

Why do veggie burgers cost more than real burgers???

 

My guess, not knowing what processing is involved with veggie burgers, is that it's the old supply-demand basic. It's a niche market, so the lesser demand drives the price higher. Probably simplified, but that might be part of it.

 

Sure, but if with cheese you only have to wait while the bacteria does its fermentation or whatever it does, it is cheaper than actually rising a cow, with all the shots, feeds, cleaning...

 

8.34 lbs is the weight of a gallon of water.

If you give the farmer $20 for 100 lbs of milk AKA $20 for 12 Gallons milk AKA $20 for the milk in 12 lbs of cheese then the $1.67 per pound of cheese goes to the dairy farmers.

 

The cattle raisers also complain of antitrust violations and price rigging being done to them by the meat packing industry,

So the average cut of beef give about $2.05 per pound to the farmer.

 

yeah, but I think the point is you have to raise the cow to get the milk anyway. Instead of killing the cow and harvesting the meat, you have to maintain that meat in a milking plant and then processes that milk into cheese.

 

Here's an interesting doco about Agriculture Consolidation: Food, Inc

 

Goat cheese is rather good and easier to make.

 

12 gallons of milk is about $40+ in the store, not $20. Farmers probably can get it for much cheaper, although here in PA milk is subsidizied, so the true cost could be higher...

 

As usual, a completely offtopic and irrelevant post...

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Well, you can look at it this way: You have to rise the cow to get meat anyway, and you get the milk as an extra... Not to mention the milk itself can help to pay for the cost of the animal keep. A cow gives on average 6 gallons a day, so that is $15-18 profit from the cow....

We already accounted for the price of milk, so we don't really need to worry what is behind its process. The bottomline is that just the price of milk alone makes the cheese more expensive than ground beef, and there is the cost of other ingredients and processing....

I am actually surprised just how cheap meat is, thinking of all the cost and hassle involved...

http://www.milkywayfarm.com/faqs.htm

 

Prices are not based on the costs of inputs, they are based on supply and demand. The costs influence the supply directly, but demand not at all.

 

Cheese comes from animals too..