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?
I watched a video last night about an American guy that was just losing it, and rightly so:
Watch five minutes of that and be happy if you are European, I guess.
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.
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.
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 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.
100% this. Do what you need to do.
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
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.
Thanks, I will certainly give your parenting advice the credence it deserves.
In my state, it doesn’t matter if he’s 25 or 55. If he drives my car regularly he has to be on my policy for my car. That’s the law. He has his own policy, for his own car. I don’t ever drive his car, so I’m not on his policy. But since his car is a Mini, he borrows mine a lot too. And I don’t like committing insurance fraud, so I follow the law.
Dunno where you are, but in the US, 16 year olds drive.
And every kid and every family is different. You parent your child, and I’ll parent mine. You’re not entitled to even form a fucking opinion on my parenting.
In my state, it doesn’t matter if he’s 25 or 55. If he drives my car regularly he has to be on my policy for my car. That’s the law. He has his own policy, for his own car. I don’t ever drive his car, so I’m not on his policy. But since his car is a Mini, he borrows mine a lot too. And I don’t like committing insurance fraud, so I follow the law.
The car is insured, not the driver. Your comment made it sound like you still had him on your policy for his car.
Dunno where you are, but in the US, 16 year olds drive.
In the USA, and while this is correct that they can drive, they shouldn’t be. Just as when someone hits 65 they should be required to take yearly driver courses. A vehicle is not a right it’s a privilege. We should have mass transit and the same level of driving requirements the EU has to get a license. Way to make people absolutely fucking suck at driving, and unfortunately the elderly and teens make up the majority of crashes.
And every kid and every family is different. You parent your child, and I’ll parent mine. You’re not entitled to even form a fucking opinion on my parenting.
No where did I question your parenting. I made a comment about an over all belief that kids need more responsibility these days. Calm down padre.
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.
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.
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?
Well god forbid I actually need to use the service I pay for.
Great Depression? Shit I was serving that shit with hot dogs in the 90s.
American food makes British food look yummy.
Meat!? In this economy?
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.
Food in the kitchen is usually measured in pounds for meat and vegetables (similar to the UK) and grams for most other dry goods. So the recipe would call for 2 pounds of beef but 5 grams of salt. The Costco hot dogs are guaranteed to weigh at least ¼ pound.
The most confusing thing is soda, because it is sold in containers of either 350 mL, 16 oz, or 2 L.
Edit: Photograph of Costco hot dog. They are also sold at the food court for $1.50 each, and it comes with unlimited soda from the Coca-Cola machine in the background. This is probably why Americans are so fat.
Yeah, so for anyone too lazy to do the math, that means Costco hot dogs are more than twice as big as those Danish ones, and only cost 50% more (excluding taxes).
Costco wins this round.
Not a fair fight. Costco keeps the hot dog and rotisserie chicken prices artificially low to attract customers.
These items bring in people that buy
This is FAKE NEWS because Trump said the Economy is doing GREAT!
-Free Thinking TM Republicans!
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.
claps
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
Bad Hanson go back to embarrassing yourself on YouTube.
Do … do you think talking to predators trying to offend is embarrassing?
You uh… you might want to reconsider many life choices if you think so…
No I’m referring to how Hanson was being a dip shit on YouTube clout chasing like a dumbass awhile back.
Clout chasing? Do you mean doing collabs to advertise his new ventures?
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 grew up across the street from a large grocery store, and around the corner from a convenience store, but still my mom would stockpile many months worth of stuff like flour, sugar, oats, spices, tea…
I mean, if you manage to get good discounts and have spare room, I guess go ahead.
I’d rather not pay for mass amounts of storage for what is usually a comparatively small saving on bulk purchases
When I lived in Florida it was like that. It would be about 3.5 hours walking for me to do it where I am now. (Including the way back)
According to Google maps, a one way walking trip to the nearest grocery store would take 4 hours and 36 minutes for me.
If times were better I’d say you live in a pretty decent place for you to open a small grocery store. But I guess you could just live in the middle of no where
I mean it’s just some pasta and seasoning that you add beef to, it’s not even that weird
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.
Thank you, I’d seen something like this before, did not manage to snag a copy that time =D
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
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
It tastes a bit like plastic and gel.
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.
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.
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.
Hyper processed shit. I feel sorry for children who are fed this.
Removed by mod
How soon till it says roadkill?
Poached venison.
Don’t need a tag if you’re not going to a game station, just gotta get a little bloody.
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.
You mean pasta surrogate and cheese surrogate.
Usually not. I have not had the pleasure of this particular variety but in my experience it’s just plain old pasta and cheese and herbs.
What sort of cheese is that supposed to be?
A quick search says cheddar and blue cheeses for this type.
Different cheeses depending on the end goal. If you dehydrate cheese it can be ground into a powder. I’ve seen cooks on various shows do this to recreate powders for popcorn seasoning, home made Doritos, Cheetos, or even for long term prepping/storage. Makes it easy to create sauces in a pinch as well.
It tastes similar to Kraft macaroni and cheese (known in Canada and potentially other countries as “Kraft Dinner”). So I would guess young, unaged cheddar or Colby cheese. There is also probably a good amount of whey powder, which is a by-product of cheese production.
It’s not fake, just highly processed.
The pasta is real, the seasoning is real, the cheese basically is not real.
For example, regular Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper contains trace amounts of blue cheese, which is absent from the Deluxe Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. The “Deluxe” product also contains parmesan cheese, palm oil, and lactic acid. These can all impact the texture and taste of the dish.
In an email to the Daily Dot, an Eagle Foods representative wrote the following: “The difference between the Double Cheeseburger Mac and the Cheeseburger Mac products are that, for the Double Cheeseburger, the ingredient ratios are slightly different and there is double the amount of cheese powder in the seasoning packet.”
https://www.dailydot.com/news/regular-deluxe-cheeseburger-hamburger-helper/
Its only ‘real cheese’ if you consider a dehydrated powder that you have to add butter or milk / water to, and then prepare with heat as a ‘cheese flavored sauce’ to be ‘real cheese’.
Yep, the tiny trace amounts of ‘100% Real Cheese!’ it contains are indeed tiny denydrated crumblets of real cheese… but I am fairly sure that by that metric, Cheetos are also ‘real cheese’.
For most Americans under the age of 40, the idea of making an actual cheese sauce out of… an actual block of actual dairy cheese from their refrigerator… that is literally a foreign concept, nobody has time to be that fancy, or even knows that is a thing you can do.
I’m aware you can, but also cheese is expensive.
And making cheese sauce is like, the easiest thing to fuck up. I’m having trouble with an analogy, but it’s not easy. If we’re talking about a roux based sauce at least. If there’s an easier way I would love to know.
- Heat a spoonful of butter in a pan.
- Once it’s melted and just sizzling, add about a spoonful of white flour, and stir until you have a smooth paste.
- Cook the roux until it’s slightly darker to give the sauce a richer flavour.
- Add a spoonful of milk and stir until smooth. This is the critical step, but it works out fine unless you let it burn.
- Keep adding milk, a spoonful or two at a time, and mixing, until the sauce is quite liquid and you’re not having to stir much.
- Add the rest of the milk a little faster, still stiring.
- Cook until the sauce is heated through, and bubbling.
- Add unhealthy amounts of your prefered cheese, grated, and keep stiring.
- Cook until the sauce starts to thicken and remove from the heat. It’ll thicken more as it cools.
It seems like a lot of steps, but once you get the hang of it, it’s quick and reliable. The recipies that add flour to a lot if liquid have a tendency to get lumpy, this one cooks the flour in fat first and adds liquid slowly, which pretty much eliminates the issue.
It’s way outside of my skill set. Lol. But I just need people to know that I’ll be impressed with gifts of cheese. You know, if anybody wants to impress me. 🤣
Throw a couple cups of milk in a pot, start to heat on medium/medium high (don’t let it boil.)
While that’s heating, take about half a cup of milk, and a couple fat tablespoons of flour and whisk it together in a separate bowl. It should be thick, but not real lumpy. If it comes out like mashed potatoes, add more milk.
Once the hot milk starts to bubble on the stove, slowly whisk in about half of your flour mixture. Let it come back to a slight bubble and see how thick it is. If you want it thicker, add more of the flour mixture. Once it bubbles for a minute or two, that’s almost the final consistency as it’s going to thicken a little as it stands. Add salt, pepper, garlic powder, etc. to taste. Turn the heat off. Add a bunch of shredded cheese. If you heat it with the shredded cheese in it, you run the risk of the sauce breaking. Check it again for flavor, and if it thickens up too much as it cools, you can always add a little more milk.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make is heating up a sauce too much after it has the cheese in it. This can make the cheese break and get gross. I also have zero issue with using pre-shredded cheese this way either. And bonus tip, if you throw a slice of American cheese in there, it’ll have enough sodium citrate to help make it a very smooth cheese sauce.
Yeah you can do what that other guy said or just buy Sodium Citrate. It’s $13 for a bag but it is enough to make 53 lbs of cheese sauce…
- Add 1 tsp to 1 cup of water.
- Boil.
- Add 1 lb of cheese, any kind.
- Heat for an additional 5-10 minutes - you’ll know when it’s done.
That’s it. Your done.
Oh I’m not saying its all 100% bad.
Having a reasonably healthy, similar tasting alternative is good when it is a good deal cheaper.
I’m just saying it doesn’t cross my bar of ‘real cheese’.
Used to be a bit of a brie and wine snob, and I still have the strong opinion that basically all pizzas should be 3 cheese blends, not just one.
Because to make a proper cheese sauce you need to make a proper roux, and idk who you think is teaching the average person to do that.
That is certainly not common knowledge today, and I doubt it has ever been common knowledge your everyday person would know. Nor is it easy to do for the inexperienced cook.
Though I think most Americans would be happy with Sodium Citrate if they knew about it
the cheese sauce i make is great and its roux is very improper.
Used to be that parents and grandparents would teach the kids how to cook something a bit fancier for a holiday.
But we’re all too atomized and busy and politically polarized these days for that.
Yeah and many have.
I can make Chicken Parmesan with our family recipe sauce, and a proper lasagna. With coffee cake for dessert.
I sill was never taught how to make a roux. And I come from a family that home cooked meals every night.
I learned how via YouTube, and I still can’t do it without fucking up 50% of the time.
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.
Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.
Where’s the cheeseburger part?
That’s the ground beef, it’s basically Mac and cheese with hamburger meat IE ground beef.
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.
Bold of you to assume you’ll still be about to afford hot dogs.
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.
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 FYI hotdogs roughly contain about 2% human DNA in them.
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!
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?”
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.
Been trying to convince my peers of this but im vegetarian so they tink im just being alarmist
You’re perceived as an alarmist not because youre vegan but because the risk is so low. Tell people to not drink or drive slower. To eat healthy. There are so many things.
It’s weird how quick they tend to accuse vegans and vegetarians of bias, when the former positions objectively have so much evidence and benefits in their favor, and require overcoming generations of traditions and overwhelming societal pressure.
One of those accusations are an admission things I guess.
Here is an extract, because I think you are not totally truthful, or at least not saying it all (I understand it as: don’t eat smoked meat every day):
consumption of processed meat is “carcinogenic to humans (Group I ),” and that consumption of red meat is “probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A).” The report differentiates the two meats as follows:
Processed meat – meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation
Red meat – unprocessed mammalian muscle meat such as beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse and goat meat
And which part was untruthful?
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.
Yeah, it’s like everything, don’t over do it?
What retirement?
