Vegetarians looking for healthy restaurant food that also respects the planet will have to be very unkind to their pocketbooks in order to find it. That’s what Earthsave Canada volunteer and past president Nancy Callan has observed while organizing her bi- or tri-monthly Vegan Dine Outs and monthly Veggie Drinks Nights. The events take place at both vegetarian and nonvegetarian restaurants across the Lower Mainland, and Callan has noticed a general price increase across the board over the past few months.

“Our meals would come in at about $16 [per person], including tax and tip, for more than just one—maybe there would be two—appetizers, a taste of a couple of entrées, maybe a dessert, [with] soup or salad added to that,” Callan told the Georgia Straight during a Veggie Drinks Night in February at Chivana Restaurant on West 4th Avenue. “Now we’re really lucky if we can come in under $20 [per person]. If it’s an Ethiopian place serving mostly lentils, we can often get it around $16. Or [at] some of the Chinese restaurants we can come in at $16, but anything other than that we’re looking at $22 or $25 per person.”

On this night, one soft drink, a medium-sized entrée, and a portion of yam fries cost $19.52 including tax and gratuity. Drinks nights include entrées, which are vegetarian and non-vegetarian, though the theme of the events is to “socialize with others in transition towards a more plant-based diet”, according to the foundation’s new Metro Vancouver Vegetarian Directory.

The nonprofit organization’s Web site, www.earthsave.ca, gets 30,000 hits a day, according to Callan, and her e-mail update goes out to 2,000 people.

John Burgess, a vegan cyclist who devotes a lot of time to looking at prices when he shops for food and eats out, told the Straight that he has seen increases in the price of everything since the “worldwide global depression” began 18 months ago.

“But I think I’ve noticed real dramatic increases in food [prices],” Burgess said at the same Earthsave event. “Not just food in the grocery store, or food when you eat out or at the farms.”

Burgess said that staples he buys to support his vegetarian lifestyle, such as packaged dried seaweed, are expensive “to begin with”.

“I was buying it [dried seaweed] for something like $3.60 a pack for a couple of years—all at the same price,” he said. “Then, just in the past six months, the price has gone up to something like $4.30. So a huge jump, just like that.”

However, Burgess said that eating out in Vancouver is still cheaper than in many other places, including England, where he is from.

So should Vancouverites just shut up and pay up?

“It’s hard sometimes when you get an entrée that’s mostly potato and lentils and it’s $16,” Callan said. “And you think, ”˜You know how much those lentils cost?’”¦I just know it’s hard to run a restaurant. I’m not saying that we should be paying those prices, but I know that restaurants aren’t exactly raking it in either.”

Marc Lee, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said that while he hasn’t studied the economics of the restaurant industry very closely, he feels the “cost of the raw food is probably relatively small as a share of their [restaurants’] total expenses”.

“To the extent that, say, it’s a quarter of the total cost, and [say] that’s going to go up, that is going to be significant,” Lee told the Straight by phone. “I think generally what it means is restaurants will have to pass their costs along to consumers.”

In a new series called Food Price Watch, released last month by the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Equity group, the World Bank’s food benchmark index increased 23 percent between January and December 2009.

“While the global focus on food prices has waned, domestic staple food prices in several countries have experienced double digit increases in 2009,” the document states.

Lee said he’d like to see B.C. pushing for greater food self-reliance gradually over the next 20 to 30 years. He acknowledged that this would lead to higher food prices and would affect low- to middle-income families in particular.

“It means that we need to redistribute our income in a way that allows people to be able to afford decent food,” Lee said. “Even right now, with the abundance of cheap food, subsidized in so many ways”¦still there is a problem at the bottom of the income ladder with people being able to afford decent food.”

If those subsidies are removed and we have to rely more closely on what we can produce locally, then the situation is going to become “much worse”, Lee added. Another option, he said, would be to ensure that people earn a living wage that allows them to afford nutritious food.