Isn’t ultra processed crap like that normally pretty expensive though? I find its always cheaper to make a cheese sauce and some pasta myself and doesn’t require ultra processed ingredients.
You’re forgetting time. Cooking from scratch takes time that many ppl can’t afford. I think we forget how closely linked freetime and wealth are
https://www.daringgourmet.com/homemade-hamburger-helper-cheeseburger-macaroni/#recipe
This probably takes about as much time as hamburger helper out of the box does. And yes, I know not everyone is going to have those ingredients on hand, but most people who keep their pantry stocked with the basics are going to have everything.
Or I can just buy hamburger helper and some hotdogs for $4 instead. So I save time and money.
Also if I live in a food desert god help you if you’re able to get any of this stuff in the recipe in a reasonable amount of time/at all
It’s crazy to me that the so-called “greatest country on earth” has normalized the term “food desert”.
Sounds like something ripped straight out of the Maoist era of China, unreal.
https://youtu.be/V-a9VDIbZCU
This video exactly explains the thing you’re missing about it
Seems weird calling the weiners hot dogs instead of calling just the whole hot dog the hot dog
I think usage is regional. Although I’ve never lived in a region where anyone actually used the term wieners. I’ve heard franks used sometimes. But mostly it’s brats, sausages or dogs. Brats are only bratwurst. Dogs are only hot dogs, it doesn’t matter what kind of meat or even vegan, but it’s unseasoned. Sausages are any other seasoned meat in a casing.
This is my easy hamburger helper recipe in case people want real food. I skip the box and throw paprika and onion and garlic powders on my ground beef, brown it. Add ziti noodles, or anything I have, add beef stock and water. Let the pasta become tender, abt 7-8 mins. And throw in a huge glob a sour cream and mix it in. Salt as needed, skip the sodium spike
By hot dogs, they mean dog food.
And by dog food they mean food made out of dog.
And by dog, they mean raccoon.
Cheaper if you grind up your nearest billionaire and share with your community
I want to know which billionaire. Some of them literally stew in their own shit for years.
Ooooh, do you have a nice recipe that you could share?
They don’t actually do work so their meat is already tender like veal, just marinate well
What is the word for laughing and crying at the same time?
Pseudobulbar affect which could be caused by a psychotic break since they’re driving us fucking crazy.
Also related to Emotional lability. Sometimes this can be a response to high stress of prolonged stress.
The comments are teaching me I grew up poor and still eat poor.
I mean I knew the second part. But those damn canned mixed veggies were disgusting.
My youth prepared me for this and my post-schooling education helped me minmax for it.
I still have a sweet spot for canned corn, especially creamed, as well as canned green beans.
Creamed corn and green beans are amazing agreed.I also picked up a love of canned sweet peas.
Some things can way better than others.
Canned green beans are great. I don’t care how many fancy meals I eat, there’s always gonna be a place for that nostalgic flavor.
And canned corn is basically my preferred method of adding corn to soups.
Canned green beans have such a nostalgic taste, love them
I literally just had a can of sweet corn mixed with a can of green beans, 10/10, didnt feel poor at all.
Coming in 2029 - SkwrlHelper!®
Hyper processed shit. I feel sorry for children who are fed this.
Wtf are you guys eating over there… Jesus christ, I wonder why Americans seem so crazy. Artificial food, artificial media, Artificial work culture…
And two weeks vacation, maybe, on a full year of work… What? And still no money in the wallet at the end of the day?
They eat shit and buy 85" TVs .
Yeah but the TVs are like $300. And one week of groceries is like $300.
It’s not really fair to say people waste their money on tvs
I get 40 hours of sick time off per year that I can use for vacation. This is the New York State minimum that had to be fought for.
Highschool needs to teach financial literacy. $200 a month for insurance is insane. I pay that for 3 vehicles on full coverage (older trucks and suv, but damn).
Not saying this guy is wrong to be pissed but I see a lot of people who just don’t understand how to shop around for shit and just eat the cost.
I agree with him though, we need single payer and mass transit.
Edit: also the further I get into this. The more I think we need to single payer so he can go to therapy, cause he’s depressed as hell.
$200 a month for insurance is peanuts if you have a teen on your policy. Our premiums tripled when we added our 16yo. He’s 24 now, so pretty soon we’re going to remove him from our policy and enjoy the savings.
16 year olds shouldn’t be driving anyways, so I’m not surprised your premiums went up. Also…24 and you’re still paying for his insurance???
In most states the guardians can pay insurance for their dependent up until 25, at least for healthcare and the parents are probably extending that to their son’s car insurance, generously. My mom kicked me off her plan when I was 23, but I’ve always had to pay for my car’s insurance
18 here but at that age kids gotta grow up. Helping them financially when they get into a pickle is one thing but not teaching them what stuff costs sets them up for a world of hurt.
Insurance rates change depending where you are and who you are. 250 a month per vehicle for full coverage where I am. We just dropped coverage to minimum on one of them and it went down barely 15%. Shopping around found only higher rates somehow. I think insurance agencies are colluding to fix prices.
O they absolutely collude on pricing, but $250 a month for full coverage means you’re probably driving a nearly brand new car…just why. Why does everyone buy the latest and greatest constantly and then cry about how much shit costs.
Nope, ones a 2015 and the others a 2017. I bought the 2017 for under 10k.
That’s crazy, it means you’re going to write off the entire worth of the vehicle in 2 years time. The hell do you live that you’re paying $500 a month for 2 vehicles? Or do you have a shit driving record?
How tf do you shop around for insurance.
My employer: you have 3 options. The high deductible HSA plan, the medium deductible plan, or the low deductible plan.
Even if there are other options that aren’t subsidized by my employer, you can’t change your plan most of the year because of fucking open enrollment.
How is this user error and not America being America?
Car…car insurance, it’s why I called out we needing single payer healthcare. This video was a dude bitching about car insurance.
LOL guess I just proved Americans are illiterate cause I reread the comment and it clearly said car insurance
Lol you’re good, we do need to spend a lot more on our education system though.
people who just don’t understand how to shop around for shit and just eat the cost.
The problem is, you can shop around and find a good deal, but that good deal is “introductory”, only for new customers, so after a while the price goes back to “normal” and you have to do it all over again. Then you have to do that for every damn thing, it gets pretty tiring.
Yea usually you gotta do it every few years.
I tried reading the rest of the comments on this post but I think my soul broke, I wanted to reply to multiple of them but the words just didn’t come to me
I also feel deep sadness over it because its just so incredibly unfair and evil.
Welcome to unregulated capitalism. I was screamed at by my managers all the fucking time when I made $13/hr with 35 hours of paid sick, that never rolled over and counted as vacation time. Now I make nothing and I only scream at myself. I’ll take a win where I can get one
Yeah. Actually i admire your human spirit. Taking so much crap and still not letting it beat you down. I honestly dont know how it would transform myself if I was subjected to it. You are talking to someone who always had a cushy office jobs in IT their entire career, well paid, in Sweden.
I havent come close to suffering the way you have in my career.
And that is all I’ve ever wanted, but not having a bachelor’s degree and two masters means I’m unemployable to 90% of corporations. I have been coding since I was 14 but that doesn’t matter in terms of experience on job applications. After 11 years of dead end jobs that I could never live off, I’m living with my older sister who has a bachelor’s degree and 2 masters and owns her house. So that how lifting yourself up by your bootstraps goes, a very common American myth is that something comes from nothing.
lie just lie on your resume to get that job, if your survival is at stake you have no other choice.
Two weeks? If you’re middle to upper middle class, sure. If you’re lower middle to lower class, you’ll get a week, if anything at all, unpaid. Sick? Unpaid. Spouse died? Unpaid. What, give people welfare? Not on my tax dollar, that’s communism!
The US stopped being the land of opportunity two generations ago, and only now people are starting to realize.
“You can have the funeral in the alley behind the restaurant during lunch. Throw your wife in the dumpster after you’re done.”
-Your manager
“The price of meat is skyrocketing, you sure your wife couldn’t… contribute?”
-Owner
“Your wife didn’t have enough meat on her bones, bring in your eldest child on Monday.”
-Corporate
Today’s special:
Long pig served with boiled potatoes, haluski and dandelion salad. Pay only 1$ extra for entree (mystery meatball soup) and 50c extra for dessert (vinegar pie)
I have had 1 week off the whole year. I have some PTO coming up. I feel guilty using it (even though I shouldn’t).
I mean, yeah…a lot of people here have it very rough. I am lucky in that I work for the federal government and get 10 weeks plus holidays off. A lot of people here do not get that.
I am definitely doing life wrong, mind if I ask the field?
I had that once, turned out the head of my department was a sociopath though. Never been unhappier at work in my life. I had managers that handled themselves better at a car wash than this lady did at a public library.

I ate a lot of hamber helper growing up. Often with weird meat we would get from food pantries. Like bison. Emu. And my dad would hunt deer some times or a relative would so we would eat it with ground venison. Which apparently is considered gourmet meat but I really do not like it. It always tastes like blood to me.
Anyway, when I was lucky enough to get it with ground beef, I recall actually loving it.
As an adult I haven’t really eaten it so I went and bought a box a while back.
I think the cheeseburger kind.
Jesus. It’s so gross and bland. Like salted cardboard. It also only had like 3/4 of a cup of dried noodles in it.
I remember a box of it feeding all 3 of us kids easily. With leftovers. There is very little yield after it cooks now. Shrink-flation.
Now I will say the box casseroles that Aldi sells are decent.
I like the orzo cheese broccoli one and the hamber one , which I cook with peppers. It has a strong cilantro flavor.
But the Hamber Helper brand ones are just so gross. I don’t know if the flavor has changed or maybe they were always that bad.
I swear so much food I thought was good as a kid literally just tastes like salted cardboard. Tostitos “pizzas”. Pizza rolls, McDonald’s food.
I’m pretty sure they have stopped putting seasoning on a lot of food to cut costs.
water pie all over again, but who can afford hotdogs?
I was about to say, hot dogs are more expensive per pound than ground beef. Do people generally know what ingredients go into hot dogs?
Lips we hope. Honestly never got the aversion around what parts go into your processed meat, its a good thing to not waste meats.
Based glizzy take
Removed by mod
Fill that freezer with ground beef, salmon, steaks, etc
Sorry, I’m European, could someone explain what Hamburger Helper actually is?? I’ve heard the brand name before and assumed it was just some kind of seasoning powder for making hamburgers, but this image looks more like it’s more like powdered sauce base for a whole range of random meals?
It’s cheap pasta with a sauce you add hamburger to.
Oh, you eat it without the bread?
Yeah; you don’t put a hamburger into it, just ground beef (or chicken, or tuna, or whatever other meat you’d like, really). lol
If you had money for a hamburger, you probably wouldn’t be eating Hamburger Helper.
Yeah, that makes sense. I can even imagine how it tastes now.
Around here, people use spaghetti (and probably an egg to make it larger), what is probably not too different.
Adding eggs to random shit really does help it feel more filling. Like if I eat a packet a ramen I would never feel full, throw in a couple eggs and it’s fine. And I can’t afford to go to the doctor so it’s not like they can tell me my shit diet is killing me. I didn’t know what a frittata actually was until recently. We have chickens and I was trying to get rid of some eggs and my fiance found a frittata recipe online. It’s basically, whatever you’ve got throw in a vessel with eggs and bake it. Cut up peppers, onions, can of green beans, or corn, maybe some sausage or whatever you had left, add that other can you had sitting in the cupboard throw it in the oven and go sit down. It may not be considered a frittata at that point. What spices were added. Whatever the fuck sounded good at that moment. Probably some Tajin, why not.
Why am I still typing, I don’t even know what I was talking about… Maybe I’m hungry
It tastes a bit like plastic and gel.
Take that imagined taste and make it about 30% worse then you’re in the ballpark.
30% worse, 150% saltier.
I skip the box and throw paprika and onion and garlic powders on my ground beef, brown it. Add ziti noodles, or anything I have, add beef stock and water. Let the pasta become tender, abt 7-8 mins. And throw in a huge glob a sour cream and mix it in. Salt as needed, skip the sodium spike
Lasagna, except way grosser.
it’s the kit to make the meal in the front, just need to add the hamburger… or hot dogs…
but yea it has the seasonings, maybe emulsifiers, the macaroni, and instructions, and that’s it
ooh, hamburger as in, ground meat? For me a hamburger is always the round puck of meat between buns, makes more sense if it’s just the generic name for the meat itself!
Usually people say ground beef, but some call it hamburger meat, or just hamburger.
It’s because ground beef became synonymous with Hamburg steaks, which was basically a patty of ground beef. Some dude went to a Hamburg steak place and wanted to get it to go so they slapped it between two pieces of bread and thusly the hamburger was born.
Seemingly many great dishes were born from impatient diners.
Desperation is the mother of utility and hunger is the grandfather of all creations.










