Some of y’all never had Helper and it shows.
“Want to eat at my house? My mom’s making Helper.”
“You mean like Hamburger Helper?”
“Yeah but without the hamburger.”
Being too poor to afford hamburger is not exactly a new condition.
Hamburger Helper without the Hamburger still slaps.
I don’t know if this is actually true or not, because I didn’t grow up eating a lot of hamburger helper, but I think it’s the fact that they’re advertising it for the cheaper meat that’s a recession indicator.
Try it with Ramen instead of hot dogs for even cheaper calories /s
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.
It is the special kind of metabolism of cows that causes their high emission of methane
Google says methane stays in the atmosphere for less than 12 years. Treating this as markedly different from CO2 seems disingenuous.
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.
Try with dog food!
This shit will raise your cholesterol like nothing else.
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!
Use Hot Dogs instead of Hamburger in Hamburger fucking Helper?
I think it means we are great again?
Foreign Nations gaze upon our culinary prowess in fear.
My partner and I can afford some pretty reasonable dinners. But one of our go-to staples is literally a box of Kraft Dinner and sliced hot dogs.
We’ll make 3 boxes worth and fridge the leftovers for quick dinners for a couple more days.
Don’t be throwing slander at the vast usefulness of the glorious hot dog.
T-rumps in a blanket.
I call it my childhood
with real cheese
Yeah, I don’t believe that an just the fact you have to say it makes me suspicious.
“Actually (mostly) edible!”
Depends where this is taken.
In Canada, our “cheese powder” is literally cheddar cheese grated extremely fine and dehydrated. So it’s literally real cheese, and not some test tube product.
If this was American, I would assume the “made with real cheese” was the cardboard of the packaging since their cheese is fucking garbage.
You add the real cheese in yourself
The brand is called Real Cheese and does not guarantee detectable cheese levels in their cheddar flavored blocks
Hot Dog Self-Harm Assistant
Brilliant
“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.
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.
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.
I want to chime in and say that while my meal prep won’t win any blue ribbons, rice plus TVP is my MVP. It’s cheap because it’s a diversion of defatted soy flour, which is otherwise used as animal feed (so demand won’t drive prices up long term, the price actually goes down if it gets more popular). TVP is 50% protein by weight, and its digestibility is remarkably similar to beef.
I use it in a ~1:2 ratio with rice by dry weight. Actually here’s my recipe:
- 2.5c (460g) white rice, dry
- 3c (280g) TVP, dry
- 2 cans of any kind of bean, preferably low sodium
- 2.5 tsp beef base, again preferably low sodium
- 2 packets of taco seasoning (you guessed it, preferably low sodium)
- 1.3L of water total
- Start the rice
- Rehydrate TVP by mixing 1:1 with boiling water, beef base, and taco seasoning in heatproof bowl. Stir thoroughly and let it sit until the rice is done.
- Combine with drained beans
- Portion and freeze for up to 90 days.
- Reheat from frozen in a microwave for 3min or on auto with a little water.
- Mix in 1 tbsp of butter or oil. if you do not do this it will taste like shit, this is the only fat in the entire recipe
Buying in bulk at Winco, the total cost per batch is $6.29 here in the PNW. Divvy it up into 9 portions and that’s $0.70/serving.
I have no idea as to what TVP is.
Textured vegetable protein, aka textured soy protein, soya chunks, maybe a couple other names. It’s basically the part of the soy left over after they extract the oil out of it. It takes on the flavor of whatever you put in it. When it’s dry it has a shelf life of a couple years or so. And it’s hella cheap, a pound of it is under 4 bucks around where I live.
Sounds like Soylent or people kibble tbh, like kudos for finding the right cheap meal for you but god it seems so sad to have to eat that. I’m not picky but I’d go crazy never eating fresh foods
Its just a base, I buy whatever produce is cheap and mix it in. Jalapeños and cilantro are a couple of my favorites. Trying to eat just this would probably give you scurvy lmao.
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.
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.
A waste of money.
Box of elbow macaroni, 1/4 block of velvita and a single hot dog is WAY less than that box
Hey, you selling loose dawgs over there? Or where you gettin’ 'em from 1 at a time?
You need a better dawg guy.
If there’s a need, i’ll start a side hustle.
At the moment, I’m perfectly happy to freeze the other 7
hot dog bun companies hate this person
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.
