Great Depression: Part Deux

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.

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.

Seems weird calling the weiners hot dogs instead of calling just the whole hot dog the hot dog

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.

Ew, are you talking about those canned mixed veggies that had the little red pepper in them too? Like red bell pepper or something.
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 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.

This might be the most stereotypically American thing I've ever seen

In Britain it would be "try with BANGERS instead of black pudding"
- No one would call that donkeys anus in a temu bratwurst a banger.
I mean, you're not wrong.
I grew up poor, in the US, mom had 0 cooking skill, mac and cheese and sliced hot dogs was pretty common.
I can try to spin that positively as 'at leasr I have more experience being broke than most people who are new to being broke', lol.
- Man hotdogs in KD is still awesome. Hotdogs in beans is also great.
Not going to lie, I call this the "fuck we're out of bread" when she says she wants a hot dog. I don't care for hot dogs much, but I just leave them in the freezer door and they last.
- When she says she wants a hot dog, she's not talking about the kind you have to cook :-D
- What a privilege it is to live in walking distance to a supermarket - this problem doesn't even exist for me, being out of something just means I walk 4 minutes and buy it.
I mean it's just some pasta and seasoning that you add beef to, it's not even that weird
claps

Protip: Hamburger Helper has always been the most expensive way to do this. Buy raw macaroni and one of those seasoning spice packs (e.g. taco mix) if you're not good with measuring seasoning or have none at home. Take a photo of the Hamburger Helper directions (on the box) with your phone if you need something to go by.

There are probably tons of such recipes online too.

...y'all didn't grow up eating kraft mac n hot dogs cut up in it?

o.o

Sorry, but this is like one of the many litmus tests for people who think they grew up in the middle class and then actually find out they grew up poorer than they initially thought.
Another good one was having canned mixed vegetables more than a couple times a week.
- You're overlooking an important detail - kids love that cheap, shitty food. It was also quick and easy to make, so their tired, overworked parents were easily persuaded to make it.
  Naturally there's a line where it becomes too much, but even rich kids love hot dogs and Mac & cheese.
- Grew up poor, didn't know it. Lots of Mac 'n Cheese w/ hotdogs and canned vegetables. I remember the first time I had a fresh green bean, I was put off by the texture. Wasn't used to vegetables with structure.
  Edit: also a fair amount of Hamburger Helper in my childhood. It's OK.
- I really disagree with this. My parents grew up in the 50s and just thought this kind of highly processed food was normal and easy. There were also commercials that constantly reminded them to buy it. We could 100% afford better food, this is just what they wanted 🤢
- It could still be very much middle class. Parents make it out of nostalgia from when they were kids, instead of making it out of necessity.
- I figured it out we were poor once I hit middle school, and me asking about this and further realizing the truth of it... well of course that sent Republican dad further into an insecurity/rage/alcoholism loop.
  Being honest would have been too difficult, I guess.
- Middle class isnt a clear cut distinction anyway. It mostly serves to divide those of us who live off of labour rather than ownership so we go after one another instead of the capitalists.
- I mean, maybe, but in my case I’m sure a good part of it was neither of my parents were good cooks lol
  If I didn’t watch them make it, it was pretty hard to tell if the veggies were canned or not; they boiled fresh veggies to the same consistency as the canned ones.
Ours had a can of tuna and some frozen peas in it.
- No way we did that too! I still do it every once in awhile, not because it's that good but fit the nostalgia

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?

A box meal. Like a cake mix. It comes with parts of the meal, the pasta and the sauce, and you add the meat and milk, water, butter. Whatever else it calls for. These are cheap. And don't take very long to make.
They are mostly eaten by poor people and kids. They have very little nutritional value and are high in carbs, sugar, and salt.
The high carbs and protein (if you are rich enough to add meat) make the food very filling though. Some people call this type of food "comfort food". It definitely will make your stomach feel full and content.
But it's not good food for you.
It's cheap pasta with a sauce you add hamburger to.
- Oh, you eat it without the bread?
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!
- Thickeners too. Modified corn starch. Less objectional ingredient really since starch as a sauce thickener instead of reduction is pre industrial and modified starch is frankly a good innovation. I don't want to sit there and stir. People who make pudding from scratch with regular corn starch are insane.
Lasagna, except way grosser.

You're not quite there yet. It still says 'real cheese'.

"made with" real cheese.
They throw a one ounce cube in with each batch.
- or they just place a block of cheese near by as a shelf or counterbalance for the chopping board for the actual ingredients.
It's not "real cheese" it's "Real Cheese™", it really tastes like cheese.
- Pretty sure fake cheese is made with vegetable oil, no?
  Also the other day I bought a small block of kraft brand Colby cheese. A little treat for myself.
  I always buy whichever brand is on sale. I'm not a cheese snob or anything.
  Anywho. I got it out to eat it.
  It's super soft. Like. .. well like fake cheese. Just like their kraft singles.
  Floppy oily yellow cheese.
  I got swindled. It says it's Colby. But it's not ! It's the fake cheese !
  Not happy. Won't ever buy it ever again.
  They just started doing this. It was real cheese not that long ago. I suspect it's been "cut," with fake cheese.
  Like it's not 100% fake cheese. But like 60% fake cheese.
  I checked packaging to make sure I just didn't buy the wrong stuff. Nope. It definitely says Colby cheese.
- Ah, Real Cheese brand cheese flavored product.
Minimum viable product kind of cheese
- "Minimum viable product" describes a lot of the items that end up in my grocery cart these days -- produce especially.

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.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_lability

What in gods name even is this product?

Pasta and seasoning. And cheese I guess. Intended to me mixed with ground beef in order to stretch it into more meals. It's not awful, just poor people food.
- Its food for the new poor. The generationally poor were eating chicken wings back in the 80s for $0.19 a pound and loving them. Now, after the dreadful gentrification of wings post-9/11 we've got ways to stretch a dollar you'll never learn unless you marry in.
- You mean pasta surrogate and cheese surrogate.
- Where's the cheeseburger part?
Sodium'n Protein possibly slightly higher quality than Friskies cat food.
- It's more of a BYO protein meal kit, with shelf stable seasoning+carb in a box, where you're expected to add your own protein.

Coming in 2029 - SkwrlHelper!®

This is FAKE NEWS because Trump said the Economy is doing GREAT!

-Free Thinking TM Republicans!

Les pieds de raccoon, such a delicacy
- Not to mention la queue du rat, la tête de pigeon, and la languette de la botte!
- Hehe. I'm eating marbles!
  Cronch cronch cronch

Don't use Hamburger Helper, switch to the store brand Lasgana Skillet Meal. It will taste much better. The people who make Hamburger Helper have seriously cheaped out on their ingredients in the last several years, speaking as a childhood fan.

Last time I checked ground beef was $6 a pound. It is now a luxury I no longer buy.

Whenever I've been going to the local Kroger, I try to find discount ground meats. You can usually find some good deals and you can freeze them.
For anything that calls for ground beef, I usually sub TVP or green lentils. Both are cheap, shelf stable and healthy options.
- What is TVP?

American food makes British food look yummy.

How soon till it says roadkill?

Hyper processed shit. I feel sorry for children who are fed this.

Great Depression? Shit I was serving that shit with hot dogs in the 90s.

Given how strong the link is between cured meats and cancer and how that is quite public knowledge now days, I interpret this as Hamburger Helper telling me to get cancer. "You don't actually want to live long enough to enjoy retirement, right?"

What retirement?
Care to share a link to a study for those "strong links"?
Everything gives cancer eventually, my hitlist is not a steack but processed food.
- Huh, I thought it was common knowledge given the news headlines about it a few years ago. The World Health Organization considers it a Group 1 carcinogen.
- It's a very high confidence in the statistical significance, but a relatively low effect (in that the difference between eating cured meats every day and eating no cured meats ever has roughly a 1% chance of making a difference in cancer incidence).
  Basically, about 4% of people who never eat cured meats get cancer in the GI tract (from throat to stomach to colorectal) at some point in their lifetimes, whereas people who eat cured meats every day get cancer in the GI tract about 5% of the time. On the one hand, that's like a 20% increase in cancer risk, but on the other hand, that makes a difference to only about 1% of the population.

Meat!? In this economy?

water pie all over again, but who can afford hotdogs?

Bold of you to assume you'll still be about to afford hot dogs.

I used to watch this youtube channel, Depression Cooking, with this old lady who lived through it showing recipes she made during the depression. It was uploaded by her grandchildren. (This was about a decade ago, before she died). Hot dogs do feature into her recipes a lot, as they were made of less choice parts and less choice meats or parts could be mixed in to stretch it. Sausage in general is like that.
It is of course possible that sausages could be too expensive, but you see that more in a war/famine type situation, as the government procures food stores for fighers and trade routes collapse. So like, the Max Miller episodes on food of the Soviet home front.
Im sorry I find historical food so interesting.
Also, in these cases, get a chicken who can lay eggs (and be prepared to guard that thing, but you should also have eggs to share), or be ready to grow some beans.

Who can afford hot dogs?

They're like $12 for a pack of 18 huge ones at Costco
- 4 USD for 9 small ones in Denmark.
  450g=16 oz or whatever you use.

Dont use hamburger helper, learn to make goulash. Its a pretty good recipe for beginners

The Poor People Useful Tips Recession Index

Fill that freezer with ground beef, salmon, steaks, etc

Clearest recession indicator I've seen so far

I don't know why, I'm pretty sure hotdogs are more expensive per pound than ground beef at my local shop. 70/30 (which is fattier than I normally purchase) was $3/lb last time I was there, hotdogs are almost double that. Maybe that's just a local thing?
I think this labelling is just marketing. Given the name of the product contains "hamburger" they can assume anyone buying it already knows they can add ground beef. I think they just added hotdogs to the label to give people ideas about other proteins they can use.
It's been decades since I've eaten Hamburger Helper, but I recall liking it more with hotdogs.
- I mean the CS skin market tanked today so I still think I'm on to something.
  It's wild that trading skins for a video game had a market cap of 3 billion. It's ridiculous that speculative trading has infected videogames.

Also FYI hotdogs roughly contain about 2% human DNA in them.

However, it was unclear whether this report was peer-reviewed or published in a reputable journal—Snopes found no record of either. The report also did not provide details about how the authors came to their conclusions, such as how they tested the hot dogs, what kind of hot dogs they tested, and whether they considered the possibility of cross-contamination affecting results.
It’s achingly frustratingly clear that the dumbasses at ClearLabs accidentally contaminated their samples. This is horseshit.
- This guy trying to rain on our human flavored hot dog parade!