Is it because the producers know health nuts are just that dumb that they’ll actually pay the extra few dollars, no questions asked, or is the process to remove gluten so involved that it necessitates increasing the price of gluten-free food?
Rice doesn’t have gluten and it’s dirt cheap. You must be talking about foods that imitate those that normally contain gluten. That means they’ll have more processing involved and use more expensive ingredients. And then in addition they aren’t sold in as high a volume of other foods with gluten. Finally, in a food label that says “No Gluten” or “Gluten Free”, the words “No” and “Free” must cost much more to print than the other words. Or maybe it’s because people will pay extra to see those words.
I think it’s a combination of low volumes and the high price of specialty foods. Also wheat flour is cheap and abundant and a gluten-free substitute is going to cost more. They charge what people are willing pay.
It’s the first one of those things you said mostly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it also the second as well in some tiny percentage.
Trying to approximate the familiar taste of wheat-based foods is extremely difficult. The few people who must have an alternative product are willing to compromise. Decades ago, gluten-free food tasted like reprocessed cardboard waste. It’s taken those decades and huge amounts of experimentation to create recipes that are palatable. Nor could they use the normal stabilizers, emulsifiers, and flavorings that make life easier for standard products because their customers demand only “natural” ingredients.
So you have unusual ingredients, small batches, “organic” ingredients, higher processing costs, shorter shelf lives, and a finicky audience. Some of these costs have actually come down over time as gluten-free products spread. You’re twenty years too late with your complaint.
BTW, there is no process to remove gluten. That’s impossible. You start with gluten-free alternatives, most of which have none of the multitude of incredibly useful baking properties wheat has.
I would think you would need production lines devoted to gluten-free products, just to avoid cross-contamination. So there’s that cost.
There are wheat starches that are processed to remove the gluten.
Well, that doesn’t help me as I am allergic to wheat (gives me hives). And I guess I will pay higher prices to get bread and cookies, since life without those things is fairly sad. On the other hand, I’m glad there are “health nuts” who pay high prices to get gluten free products which are usually wheat free as well, since this has made it possible for me to eat things I love. So I guess that gluten-free “fad” has been good for me anyway.
Outside the moralizing, mostly the first part. The price something sells for is determined by what people will pay for it, not how much it costs to produce. If gluten-free food could be made for free, producers would not start selling it for free while people will still pay more than regular food for it.
Price of production does come into play in that if gluten-free food cost more to produce than an acceptable market of people would pay for it, then no one would produce any, but that does not directly set the price.
Spot on, kayT. 
And it’s not just bread and cookies. It’s cereal, pasta, prepared foods like frozen pizza and breaded fish/chicken/mozzarella sticks, frozen veggie and pasta with cream sauce and lots of other frozen meals for starters. Canned food like soups; also condiments. Gluten is everywhere.
We’re not organic health food faddists. We eat gluten free to avoid damaging our gut and its ability to absorb nutrients. Eating gluten free isn’t a choice; it’s a necessity.
There are plenty of foods that are both cheap and gluten-free. Rice, already mentioned, is one. So are potatoes, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplants, certain cuts of beef, pork, and chicken, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Now if you want to eat foods that normally have gluten that are processed to be gluten-free, like bread and pasta, you’ll pay more because of at least that extra processing. Why would you expect otherwise?
Since the Dope is about fighting ignorance, maybe we need a little of that here.
Here’s what those goof ball health nuts at the UCLA school of medicine have to say about it:
Yes there are. But it is totally misleading to suggest that you can have a gluten-free wheat bread made by processing the gluten out. Wheat starch is not a substitute for wheat flour. Gluten-free breads are not made by processing out the gluten. Neither are any of the multitude of other products that are sold as substitutes.
The FDA allowed products containing Codex wheat starch to be labeled gluten-free just this year. It’s been available in Europe for much longer. I’m not sure if any American bread products with it exist. The point is that you can get gluten-free bread using it, but you still need to substitute some other grain protein with all the issues that involves.
For example, the ingredients list for Glutafin Gluten Free Select White Loaf is:
Agreed. Not only does making gluten-free bread require more work, but the base ingredients are much more expensive (than wheat flour and yeast).
Have any of you tried to make gluten-free bread? I have. I have an aunt with serious celiac disease and when she visited I made it. You need all kinds of special ingredients and it never really works. I don’t know how the manufacturers deal with it, but somehow they are able to make a reasonable approximation of bread. Even so, gluten-free noodles just don’t hold together like real noodles. If you want to eat gluten-free cheap, eat natural foods that lack gluten. AFAIK, the only foods that contain gluten are some grasses: wheat, rye, and one or two others. Not all grasses either: corn and rice at least have no gluten.
Wheat bread is trivial to make. You can hardly go wrong. Mix flour, water, salt, and yeast. Knead it, let it rise once or twice, bake. There is a magic ingredient that makes it all come out no matter how badly you treat it. And in fact, you can add some extra of that ingredient or use varieties of wheat that have extra naturally. That magic ingredient of course it gluten.
Now what I am not clear on is whether there is any advantage to gluten-free if you don’t have celiac disease. Celiac disease is a serious business. In my aunt’s case, it started when she suffered a severe case of gastroenteritis from bad strawberries (seveal others who ate them had the gastro) after which she simply could not tolerate wheat. In her case at least, it appears that the immune system now reacts to gluten by destroying certain cells in the intestine called vilii, which are required for absorbtion of nutrients. They gradually reform over a period of weeks, but if she accidentally ingests gluten she will be sick for weeks. This happened once when a friend served her a crab meat salad that had been made with light mayonaise which, it turned out, had been thickened with starch that apparenly contained gluten. One brand, at least, of light mayo now claims to be gluten-free, I have observed. But she was violently ill for weeks from just that trace of gluten.
Some of this has been said, but not very clearly:
[ol]
[li] Because the ingredients and production costs are somewhat higher than recipes using more standard ingredients.[/li][li]Because the production is smaller than equivalents with standard ingredients.[/li][li]Because it’s a food fad for which people will happily pay a premium, and the makers are happy to reap the extra profit.[/li][/ol]
(3 does not include those 1-in-100 or fewer who actually have gluten allergies and are happy to buy foods that accommodate their needs. I sympathize with them and everyone else who has to read the fine print on every damned thing they buy.)
In other words, it has been diagnosed by a doctor that you have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity.
Celiac disease affects only about 1% of the population. I suspect that the majority of people going gluten-free have merely bought into the marketing, and are willing to pay high prices for something they don’t need and which does no good (and can harm them if they don’t compensate).
.
It’s well documented that promoting foods as “_______ free!” builds a body of opinion that _______ must be bad for people to eat. Therefore, buying _______ free foods is a better, healthier, smarter, clever-er choice. Those damn food congloms won’t poison me with that _______.
It’s good that the fad has given the 1% a wider range of food options at reasonable prices. But everyone who raves about a gluten-free diet should be asked your opening question: “So was that a medical diagnosis?”
Exactly, and I’ll throw in that in some cases, the recipe gyrations that need to be done to make a gluten-free facsimile of something that’s normally chock-full of gluten like pasta, may actually cost more than plain old wheat flour, even if the gluten-free ingredients are cheap in their own right.
For example, regular pasta is basically flour, water and sometimes eggs, and the basic procedure involves kneading it to develop the texture and firmness by setting up the gluten strands.
Gluten-free pasta invariably involves some way to make something noodle-like, without actually involving gluten, so there’s probably a more involved process than for regular pasta, as well as ingredients that may not be used in such high quantities as durum flour or other wheat flours.
That said, I bet the lion’s share of the price difference is simply the retailers realizing that they have a somewhat captive market without as many alternatives, so they jack up the prices. In other words, if you aren’t gluten intolerant, you can get any of the 8 or so brands of pasta in any of about a dozen shapes, PLUS the 2 or 3 gluten free types. If you’re gluten intolerant, you can choose those 2-3 types, or go elsewhere and get the same 2-3 brands. So they jack the price up because your options are limited, and you’ll probably be willing to pay. They’ll almost certainly adjust the price up or down until they hit that point where they are charging as much as they can without losing sales- that’s called “charging what the market will bear”.
I think part of it is a matter of cross contamination. Gluten is everywhere and if a bit is found here and there. If you need to be sure of no gluten you will pay to have places cleaned.
It’s more more efficient to have a factory that can process both wheat and rice. Less so if they have to limit themselves or clean up after each factory process.
I think that factors into it a bit as well.