Pulses: what a portion really costs on your plate, compared

I made a dal one Sunday evening with whatever was lying around: the bottom of a bag of red lentils, an onion, a tin of tomatoes, spices already in the cupboard. Four portions, two of them eaten the next day at lunch. While putting the bag away, I looked at the price per kilo printed on it and did the division. The result looked wrong, so I did it again.

The calculation nobody does in the aisle

A portion is measured dry, and that’s where everything happens. Pulses roughly triple in volume when cooked, so a small bag yields far more than it looks like. The cost per portion falls to a few tens of cents, and it drops further if you buy in bulk or in large packs.

A portion of meat, even on promotion, even a cheap cut, sits one or two price brackets higher. Not a few percent more, but a multiple. On protein, the comparison still favours pulses: their dry weight is rich in protein, and they only need pairing with a cereal to cover amino acids properly, which almost all traditional cooking around the world already does. Rice and beans, semolina and chickpeas, bread and broad beans, dal and rice.

There is a real cost, and it isn’t monetary: soaking and cooking time. A night in cold water and forty minutes in a pan for dried chickpeas. That’s the real obstacle, and it weighs far more on someone who gets home at eight in the evening after a shift work day than on me, cooking at home. Tinned pulses exist and cost more, which is the usual rule: the version that saves time is sold to those who have the least of it.

Cheap, so suspicious

The most interesting thing is what happens to a food when it is very cheap. It becomes hard to sell. A supply chain makes nothing on a dried product, storable for years, unbranded, whose origin nobody can claim.

Hence the workaround: take the same raw material and turn it into a textured vegetable steak, a protein powder, a breaded patty, a drink. Add processing, packaging, a nutritional story, and the price per kilo climbs back to meat level, sometimes above it. The vegetarian aisle of a supermarket is an excellent place to observe this: the most expensive products are made from the cheapest agricultural raw materials.

No advertisement will ever praise the lentil. There’s no marketing budget for a dried pulse, because there’s no margin to protect. That also explains why it’s still presented as emergency food, the diet of a broke student, when it’s a major agronomic foundation that enriches the soil with nitrogen instead of depleting it.

At home, in practice

I cook a large batch at once, usually on Sunday, and freeze it in portions. That removes the time obstacle for the whole week. I season generously, because the main reason people don’t like pulses is that they’ve eaten them bland and without fat. A spoonful of oil, some acidity, dry-toasted spices, and a chickpea becomes something else.

Sunday’s dal cost less than a coffee on a terrace. I’m not sure what to do with that information, so I’ll just leave it there.