Have you walked into a grocery store and checked out the price of beef recently?

Because if you ask me, this very American food has gotten very expensive.

I'm no expert here, but Kevin Draper is.

He covers agriculture for the New York Times.

So I called him up and asked him to break it down in cold, hard numbers.

Tell me just how expensive beef has gotten.

Since 2020, it's close to doubling.

In the last year, it's maybe up 15%.

I mean, if you look at a graph, it's just directly up into the right for many years.

Over the last year or so, why have prices gotten this high?

I think there's two main explanations and then a sort of third possible explanation.

It's a lot of explanations.

Yes, exactly.

There's a supply and demand, which is so the demand story is people want more beef.

You can attribute some of this to protein craze and people wanting more protein.

You can do OZempic and people needing more protein because of GLP1 drugs.

And then on the supply side, we have the smallest cattle herd in this country in 75 years.

The herds are smaller, Kevin says, for a few reasons.

Weather, for instance.

Drought conditions mean it is harder to feed cattle, if you raise them.

And once you've thinned out a herd, it takes a long time to grow it back.

Over the last few weeks, though, any hope that beef prices were about to go down started to

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