Political Memes

It's a couple of different factors at play:

• Sales of this particular product are up and Fox News, the largest and most influential conservative media source, ran a story about it as if it's a sign of the nostalgic return of something today's old people remember from their youth.
• Most younger people correctly recognize that this trash is actually a bad sign for the economy, because it reflects a shift down market where people are opting to make this stuff instead of the more expensive option of restaurants or takeout.
• Consistent with worsening economic conditions, the price of beef in the United States is skyrocketing, so that the product itself is changing the label to recommend replacing the beef (which customers would ordinarily buy separately) with something else, like cheaper hot dogs.

The political and economic discussion is happening in the United States, and that generally means that it spills out onto the internet where national borders are less significant for where conversations might end up.

Might be that it's because Lemmy is such a small place. We had the hamburger helper meme in all yesterday and now people are posting about the general concept.

That would make the beef lobby sad.

Those things cost money. Not a lot of people have those lying around this days

The good tuna isn't cheap either. I don't want the quasi cat food from a can.

You say that like the two are mutually exclusive.

I'll enjoy mixing the meat of the rich into my artificially-cheesed hamburger helper, thank you very much.

Try with acorn shells!

Try with Soylent Green!

It probably helps to understand 'hamburger' in this sense is very low quality minced/ground beef*

*might be 'beef'

It…. Doesn’t help make hamburgers.

Hamburger helper is a boxed spice mix, you also need ground meat, then you brown the meat and add the seasoning mix. You end up with sorta a taco meat (different flavor of course) that you can then eat, mix with pasta.

It’s…. Fine? But it’s pretty depressing in this context.

Hamburger Helper is a boxed pasta mix you add to ground beef to increase the volume and "make it go farther".

TBH, it's not awful.

It's because Americans on the whole think "ground beef" is "hamburger". Like the lettuce is "salad" thing.

They need an anthropomorphic glove to sell them on the idea of adding a protein to a carbohydrate so they can manage to feed their families.

It’s basically mac and cheese with cut up hotdogs in it. Or like carbonara, with beef instead of ham. You brown some ground beef (hamburger meat, if you have never cooked anything fancy before and only know it as “that stuff you use to make hamburgers”). Then once it’s browned, you add some water, maybe milk or butter if the particular box calls for it, and the pasta+seasoning mix from the box. It basically turns into some variation of macaroni and cheese, with ground beef added.

TBH, it’s actually not awful in terms of taste. It’s as “peasant food” as peasant food can get; cheap, filling, easy to make, absolutely loaded with calories, and hopefully not awful tasting. It’s awful for you, and you’ll probably feel awful after eating it. But it checks most of the boxes that a broke and overworked parent needs to be able to feed their kids a hot meal 15 minutes after they get home from work. Just swing by the store on your way home, grab a box of Hamburger Helper and a pound of ground beef. Now you’ve fed the whole family for like $8 total.

Must be with they started putting “try it with hot dogs” on the package.

I’d argue that about half of the population sees it. But most of them didn’t vote, because they were either disenfranchised or just didn’t think it would be this bad, this quickly. And they can’t afford to take time off of work to protest, because they’re all already living paycheck to paycheck.