Try it with Ramen instead of hot dogs for even cheaper calories /s
Try with dog food!
American food is insane
I mean pasta with meat in it isn’t that weird. Other than macaroni the only other thing in the box is the powder you make the sauce with. Is that the insane part?
read the ingredients!
“real cheese” eh? sure
Depending on your definition of “real,” they’re probably correct. It was real cheese, before it was dehydrated, powdered, and mixed with an emulsifier (probably sodium citrate) so it would reconstitute itself into a cheese sauce. I’ve become a little more sympathetic to this sort of thing since I bought of pouch a sodium citrate off the interwebs and started emulsifying things I didn’t think could be emulsified, like an entire wheel of brie.
I mean, I can’t digest beef, so chicken and pork hotdogs would be an alternative. Dunno how it’d taste tho lmao
I mean, hotdogs in Mac n cheese is pretty ok.
Money aside, beef has a horrible environmental impact. Pork (as found in hot dogs) is way better.
Is this one of those, “if farmers gave their cows kelp tablets once per day to reduce methane farts, it would reduce it by 50%” deals? I find it hard to believe raising cattle produces more GHG emissions than a similar weight pig.
Why is it “pig meat” instead of pork?! That seems suspiciously hot dog specific…
Yeah, I think the total land used for cattle equals the entire landmass of north america too.
I love beef, I love hamburgers, but it’s pretty clearly unsustainable.
I suspect beef prices are only going to go up and they’ll never come down ever again.
Weird that Soy isn’t on the list, unless it’s so low it isn’t even on the same scale?
Turns out you can choose what’s on the chart. Soy isn’t there, but there’s a Soy Milk and Other Vegetables category.
Edit: Woops, the one above is a different chart. I found the protein one, but the categories are different, and I don’t see anything close to soy. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
Thanks for the link! I just learned something new, dark chocolate is almost 2x worse than beef! Only heard about the injustices towards the ppl growing cacao beans, now i know one more reason not to buy it…
You don’t usually buy chocolate to get your protein dose though. Per kilo, dark chocolate is half the impact of beef. And a serving of chocolate is not the same mass as a serving of meat.
But… yeah. It’s not nothing.
this is based on poore-nemecek 2018, which is not very good science
Both charts are interesting, thank you for adding this one!
Edit: tofu is soy-based and can be added
I heard that ground beef isnt all that bad in the total. Considering people eat tons og steaks etc. ground beef is literally jusg leftovers after all the good stuff.
If you have to eat meat, eat ground beef instead of cuts.
T-rumps in a blanket.
cheezedog enhancer.
Hot Dog Self-Harm Assistant
Brilliant
What the hell is this? are you supposed to eat that?
People will probably look forward to eating that shite
I can afford steak and chicken every night, and I still love me some Helper.
Don’t yuk someone else’s yum. Enjoy your kale or whatever dog shit you enjoy.
I consider kale as a rare treat
People will probably look forward to eating that shite
Happy to say I’m past the piss-broke stage of life, but I’ll never forget how much is sucks. One of the really shitty things about it is all the products marketed toward selling us a ‘cheap’ meal, and we buy it because you don’t question it: it’s poverty food, right? Must be among the cheapest options in the store, right?
Then you start pricing stuff out by things like cost-per-gram and realize you’re getting ripped off. To answer OPs question, I’d call that dish: predatory, bc it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
For anyone reading this who is stuck in that hell, first off: /hug. Second, the real poverty food MVP is rice. I don’t recall the price off the top of my head, and even if I did I’m sure it’s inflated since I was a frequent buyer, but look for “fortified short grain” which is usually the least expensive and is ‘fortified’ with some extra nutrients to get something other than carbs. Buy it in bulk - you can get it in 50lb bags at places like Costco (if you don’t have a membership, mooch a ride there off someone who does, they can get you through the door/checkout) or Asian/Middle Eastern grocery stores. Price it out to what you’re paying for the amount used in a single meal, and it’s like a literal nickel.
Rice makes for a boring meal by itself, but it’ll fill you up. Your second best friend is the clearance shelf. Pretty much any meat or veggie can go with rice. You’d be surprised how well other shit work with rice too… I recall having a single slice of shitty supreme pizza in the fridge; not enough for a satisfying meal, but, fuck it, whipped up a serving of rice, chopped up the slice of pizza crust and all, and threw it in when the rice was just about soft enough to eat and kinda stir fried it in. The oils from the cheese and sausage all got soaked up by the rice… end result wasn’t amazing by any stretch, but it was away more satisfying than a single slice of pizza or bowl of plain rice, tasted decent, costed pennies.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Also get a cheap rice cooker as soon as you can afford it - a pot works fine, but a rice cooker will get you much more consistent results for much less effort.
it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
Yeah, this product is an awful choice for the budget conscious.
Pasta is like $1.20/lb. There are many different ways to dress up pasta with other ingredients, whether saucy or cheesy or creamy or oily or even relatively dry seasoning. You can add a cheap protein source. You can add vegetables. In many forms, pasta is still a one-pan dish that can be made in about 20 minutes, where you prep ingredients as the water boils. Or you can put in a lot of effort (all-day sauces, hand-pounded pesto, etc.).
My favorite low effort, cheap and nutritionally complete meal is boiling a package of pasta, dumping in a can of beans, dumping in a can of premade chili, and shredding a bunch of cheddar over it. The macros are good, even for athletes, it’s cheap, and it’s easy.
As you mention, rice is between $1 to $2 per pound, based on quantity and type. There are a ton of options around that, too.
Add some beans and spices to that rice for an almost nutrient complete meal that can taste pretty damned good.
^ Beans FTW.
Dress it up with hot sauce if you can find it.
Getting slightly off the path of “cheap”…
If you have a grocery nearby that sells cheap goods from south of the border, grab some plantains. Wait until they’re good and dark, peel, cut them in half lengthwise and then in about 2” pieces and fry them. Making me hungry just thinking about it. Sofrito for the rice.
One of my favorite cheap meals.
(USD)
Sofrito jar 2.99
25 lb bag of rice 13.50 (~55 cups of rice, 25¢ a cup)
1 lb beans, pinto 1.19, black 1.59 (2 cups/bag, 60¢ cup)
Hot sauce 1.19
Plantains 65¢ each.
Rice and beans, decent serving, 1 cup cooked each makes a good amount, 85¢ total. Assuming some salt is already available to cook the rice with.
So adding a cup of sofrito, a dash of hot sauce, and cooking up a plantain will add a little over $2 to the total, make it $3 for the whole meal.
It’s crazy that those jars of sofrito got so expensive. I used to buy them for a dollar and change.
Probably tariffs? No idea. Yeah, they used to be like $1 or so.
I noticed it happened a few years ago, I would get the goya one out of convenience. Maybe people caught on at how it’s a jar of magical goodness lol. Lucky for me there’s a mom pop shop that makes it from scratch.
Scratch made sofrito? Nice!
Yeah, the store also has a lot of good food =)
If I had one trillion dollars I would still eat red beans and rice, often
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Do this, but also Freeze 'em.
The beetles you’re talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I’d suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don’t need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets.
Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry.
An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.
Not to derail your point, but rice can be especially bad for people (myself included) where carbs (esp. white rice) make you hungry. If you’re one of those people where Chinese food makes you hungry an hour later, it’s usually because your insulin spikes in response to the rice.
For those people, obviously try to avoid white rice (and flour, sugar, and potatoes). Brown rice usually includes the fiber on the outside (which gets stripped away for processed white rice) which at least slows the carb rush.
Fresh or even frozen, unprocessed veggies that you have to cook yourself are still remarkably cheap, even in this economy. A pan of random chopped veggies and some random seasonings from the spice aisle (no blends!) can easily get you a filling and nutritious meal, and still cheaper than a box of hamburger helper.
Oh, 100% this is unhealthy as fuck. I gained a ton of weight when I was piss broke cuz all I could afford was rice - exceptions were a treat. When you’re that tight on cash though, you start to prioritize it over pretty much everything else, including your own body.
Spending any more on food would have required cutting into something critical like rent - I never did have to deal with homelessness, but boy did I toe that line.
In any case, this is desperation diet - hopefully for a very short term leading up to having the means to live a healthier lifestyle.
The catch for brown rice is it’s one of the few whole grains that turn rancid fairly quickly. Don’t buy 50 pounds unless you can subdivide it into vacuum sealed bags with oxygen absorbers, lest you end up with 48 pounds of rancid rice.
Can you do the thing where you make the starch resistant rice? Cooking rice then cooling it lowers the GI, from what I understand.
Can you explain? This sounds like something that could benefit my broke ass.
I found this: https://www.snaq.ai/blog/cooled-rice-blood-sugar-research
My guess is that cooling the rice causes some of the starches to polymerize into longer chains that are harder for your body to digest, which lowers the glycemic index of the food.
I also prefer very short grained rice, which has slightly higher protein to starch ratio and reheats better. This stuff is often sold as “sushi rice.” If you’re on a budget, Calrose medium grain is fine. (If you’re not on a budget, tamanishiki koshihikari is my favorite bougie short grain rice.)
Afaik it’s literally cook rice then cool it in fridge overnight before you use it. Something about the process makes the starch change and it’s better for people with the beetus. I am not a food scientist and idk how it works.
It certainly looks like it would be better than regular rice. From some quick googling, it acts more like fiber and is better for diabetics. If I had to eat rice, it’s probably what I would do.
Note, the wild or brown rice has more nutrients, because the shell was not removed to make the less nutritious sticky rice.
Wait, so it doesn’t come with ground beef? Is it just mac n cheese then?
Hamburger Helper has always just been the noodles and sauce packs.
It’s Hamburger HELPER, not Hamburger Offerer.
But what does it help with? It sounds like you need to provide everything hamburger-y about it
It helps with stretching your budget. You can use less meat to feed your family than if you say made burgers.
The idea is you have the hamburger already, and you get this to help it be more stuff.
its a relatively inexpensive way to make a easy, low effort, very low stress meal. No prepping, no making a sauce from scratch, no hoping you have the right seasoning, oh wait, I dont, now I’ve got to run to the store, oh but I cant because I cant leave someone home alone so fuck it I guess I’ll use some other seasoning and hope it doesnt come out fucking awful, and yep it doesnt taste great but fuck it, todays been miserable enough and if you don’t fucking like it don’t fucking eat it because i’ve dealt with enough of your bullshit today I sure as fuck aint making a second meal that we absolutely cant afford.
bitching about it not having burger in it, is like bitching about having to provide your own milk in mac n cheese, or about your own eggs and oil in a box cake mix.
Who’s bitching? Not everyone is American and that stuff doesn’t exist here, it might be obvious to you because you’ve seen it all your life but to me it’s not. It’s called hamburger helper, I would have expected hamburger to have something to do with it
“This recipe for Sausage and Pepper Penne says I need Sausage! But I don’t have sausage! This recipe is stupid.”
Not quiet, more like “This penne has a recipe on the back for sausage and pepper penne, why arent there sausage and peppers in the box?!”
That’s a way better way of putting it.
Also it’s not refrigerated on the shelf
That’s where I keep mine. Right next to the ground beef.
Spoiler Alert, dry noodles generally don’t need to be refrigerated.
It comes in a box on the shelf. That would make done interesting hamburger.
You don’t like your raw meat sitting at room temperature for months on end?
Hamburger helper is bullshit. They give you some dry noodles and a “spice” pack of dubious powder, you have to provide the beef and milk. That’s not helping very much.
for real, and it’s not even enough noodles. So you end up adding more noodles too… at that point you’re paying for a box with some “spice” in it.
Thats why I make 2 of them.
For me, it’s just too salty.
Grab some mac n cheese and put some hotdogs in it. If you are wealthy*, you can add ground beef instead and toss in some green chilies and some Italian seasoning. (It’s really good. Go ham on the seasoning.)
- ground beef is freaking expensive nowadays 😩
I remember in college they had an “instant” hamburger helper where you just added water and it had dehydrated bits of hamburger in it. It probably wasn’t actually hamburger… Probably for the best to add the meat yourself.
How… Does this help in making a hamburger? I have never had a noodleburger, are they good?
“hamburger” or “hamburger meat” is what many people in the US call ground beef. Just as in other places they might call it “mince.”
The product proposes to help make one pound of hamburger meat fill a family of 4. It’s not as nourishing or effective as adding a bunch of vegetables and spices but it’s shelf-stable and quickly prepared.
Yeah it’s basically in the same category as spam and other great depression or great depression derived foods. It’s more or less filling the role thin soup once filled.
I think the “helper” might have more of a “helping” meaning, as in a helping of hamburger.
Although idk if a noodle burger would be all that bad with the right kind of bread
It’s not for a hamburger. It’s basically to make a noodle and ground beef meal that you eat with a fork.
I call that “American”
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I can classify it as food
