Making "Ends Meat"

The toughest cut you can get.

When I was a kid, my parents said “make ends meet” so often that I thought they were talking about hamburger. Ends meat. As in: things are tight, so dinner is going to be ground beef again.

In our house, dinnertime was an economic forecast. A way of reading whether the week was going to be stable or shaky. Good week? Tacos with all the fixins’. Bad week? Tacos again. But stretched thinner, the kind where you quietly hope no one notices the missing half-pound of meat.

I didn’t learn until embarrassingly late that the phrase wasn’t about meat at all. It was about the ends. The two financial edges of a month tugged so far apart they needed creativity, luck, or divine intervention to touch.

Growing up, both my parents worked full-time (sometimes more) and still, money was tight. I’m older now and I understand how much effort went into keeping food on the table every single night. There were programmatic safety nets (like SNAP) that made sure we didn’t go without. I’m grateful for all of it. My childhood didn’t lack love or effort. It lacked margin.

And now here I am, decades later, comfortable enough to choose high quality, “pricier” foods and loud enough to tell other people they should too. Which raises a fair question:

How does a girl who grew up stretching hamburger become a woman who champions $8-a-pound ground beef?

Well…by understanding the system in a way I didn’t as a kid.

When families complain about beef prices right now, I get it. Beef is expensive. And when you’ve lived through the late-’90s rural-poverty diet, your instincts tell you to hunt for the cheapest option and make it work.

But here’s something I wish more people understood: not every farmer gets to set their own price.

There are price makers: the farmers selling direct-to-consumer. They can look at their books, their pasture, their time, and say: Here’s what it actually costs to raise an animal well.

And then there are price takers: most of the commodity beef producers in this country whose cattle enter a system where four major corporations essentially decide the price on any given day.

So when people ask, “Why is beef so expensive?” I want to answer honestly: because the folks who raise it have spent decades being paid less than the work is worth and you’re used to artificial pricing. The system that sets the price is designed to squeeze the farmer, not support them.

Rural can be complicated. It can also be breathtaking.

Local beef looks expensive because it reflects reality. Commodity beef looks cheap because someone else paid the cost: usually the farmer, sometimes the community, and most often the land, soil, and water.

None of that makes it any easier when you’re standing at the meat counter doing math. I remember those days. I remember doing it with a kind of private panic I didn’t have words for yet.

So I don’t judge families for buying what they can afford and I don’t judge the direct-to-consumer farmers for charging what they need to. I’ve spent a lot of time reconciling these two truths.

Growing up the way I did taught me to see value as survival: find the deal, stretch the meat, make the meal work. But being an adult in rural Iowa—raising kids here, farming here, trying to build community here—has taught me something different.

Here’s what I know now:

1. Cheap didn’t save us. It kept us afloat, but it didn’t build anything for tomorrow.

2. Change is slow moving. Especially in communities where “the way we’ve always done it” is practically a religion. But slow doesn’t mean impossible. Slow just means human.

3. Health is wealth. Healthy food, healthy soil, healthy families, healthy communities. It all adds up. And if we don’t invest in any of it, the bill still comes due, but in different ways.

Maybe that’s the real “ends meet” I was trying to understand all those years ago. Not just how to stretch dinner. But how to build a life. It’s not about the meat. It’s about having a little more control over the ends.