Today, a food metaphor that won’t make you hungry, courtesy of the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit:
Men Are Hamburger. Women Are Hamburger Helper.
Does hamburger need Hamburger Helper? Of course not. Hamburger can be made into a simple hamburger, or a hearty meatloaf. Bachelors and MGTOW are hamburgers and meatloaves.
Hamburger Helper, on the other hand, is nothing without hamburger. It will sit in the pantry, collecting dust and mites and attracting mice, while the clock ticks closer to the expiration date. Where’s the beef?
Cat ladies and single mothers are boxes of stale Hamburger Helper.
Now, Hamburger Helper is nice to have, if you like Hamburger Helper, and don’t mind all the salt. But hamburger doesn’tneed it. There’s a million other things we can do with hamburger.
Well, if nothing else I think this gives us a little insight into the MGTOW diet.
One of the things I learned about cooking from my mother – convenience foods like Hamburger Helper are for just that, convenience. If you have the time, energy, and ingredients on hand, you can make the same thing. Probably less expensive and better tasting, as well.
Minus the time, energy and ingredients, a box of convenience is mighty convenient. One of the best things about early retirement has been having the time and energy to cook from scratch almost every day. In today’s modern world of the future, that’s quite a treat.
I’m imagining one of these Masters of the Universe scorching a lump of 80/20 ground beef in an overheated, underseasoned skillet until it’s burnt on the outside and barely done in the middle, then grimly downing it while congratulating himself on having Gone his Own Way.
We used to make a “from scratch” variation on hamburger helper called “Western Casserole”: chili powder, tomato sauce, kidney beans, instant rice and macaroni mixed in with ground beef and topped with processed cheese slices.
(It’s better than it has any right to be)
I have no idea what Hamburger Helper is, I thought that was someone wh works at MacDonalds?
Why can’t wimen be chips or even the bun, which makes more sense? I don’t know maybe men can be hot dog sausage and wimen can be the bun, that’s a pretty gross sex analogy. But some seasoning? That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. I want to be one of those thick milkshakes which give you a hernia sucking it up the straw.
For some reason, my husband won’t eat meatloaf, but he loves meatballs. It’s the same damn ingredients, just different shapes.
But yeah, these guys need to take a cooking class. Somewhere out there there’s a (male) chef who will takes these guy’s money. But then they’d have to be serious about this ‘going their own way’ stuff. And they’re not.
I’m a vegetarian and would rather have some minced Quorn, but since when do you call all mince ‘hamburger’? I thought hamburger only meant the patties as that is how they serve them in Hamburg, Germany, a bit like they call Frankfurters after Frankfurt. What do you call Salisbury steak? That is basically hamburger again but served without the bun and maybe some mashed potato and gravy.
I can’t get over the fact that he used ‘Where’s the Beef?’ wrong. It’s a Wendy’s commercial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dnUs2AqWvs
Nothing to do with Hamburger Helper at all.
Funny enough, I googled “hamburger helper without meat” and found at least a few forum threads of people who admit to eating just the noodles and not even adding meat because they think it tastes better.
Oh lord,
Do you know what happens when you throw a hunk of ground beef into an oven? You do not get a tasty meatloaf. You get a crumbling dish of beef shards with almost no flavour. Salt and pepper are essential when cooking red meat. A binding agent is essential when making a meatloaf that remains a loaf.
Granted, Hamburger Helper without the beef is a somewhat salty pasta dish, but at least it contains some kind of spice. These guys need to stay away from the analogies.
Ground beef is referred to as hamburger. A hamburger is also a meat patty made from hamburger. Ground turkey is referred to often as turkey burger, just as a burger made from that meat would be called a turkey burger.
Virgin Mary: It’s not constantly used that way, but once in a while I’ll come across an old recipe which calls ground beef “hamburger”. Most places I’ve been call “minced meat” “ground meat”.
If Creepy-Ass Face-Glove Helper* is just pasta, why doesn’t he just say “Pasta”? Is it because he realised he’d then be comparing women to one of the most popular staple foods in the world?
*I’ve been a horror fan for decades and that thing still weirds me out.
@Becky Hopkins
People have their own tastes, I mean I worked with a guy whose usual lunch was one of those little ramen bricks, but he didn’t cook it, put hot sauce on it and ate it raw like it was a big granola bar.
Hamburger helper without the noodles sounds much better than that.
@ robyn
@JoeB
meant w/o beef obviously, but w/o noodles you at least have seasoned ground beef.
I’ll never understand why MRAs think it’s useful to keep expressing the same old ideas by using new, increasingly tortured metaphors. A good metaphor can be uses to highlight an idea and explain it in more easily understandable terms, but for some reason MRAs do it the other way around. They have these weird ideas, and they just keep coming up with new metaphors as a sport. What the fuck is the point of this behavior? Are they just bored and lack the creativity to accomplish something useful and/or interesting?
@ Virgin Mary
The Quorn mince is pretty good, especially for things like burgers. If though you’re making something that’s going to be strongly flavoured like chilli or curry, you might want to check out TVP if you can find it. It’s really cheap and even in my carnivore days I couldn’t tell the difference from real meat.
@Axe
Yeah, the new gadget was used extensively for a few weeks and got put away when I went out of town last week. I’ll pull it back out soon, I’m sure, but I’ve learned a lot already about what it is and is not good for. 😉
@Everyone asking about hamburger helper:
http://thejewishlady.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/a14.png
That Hamburger Helper is just this basically, I see no point involving hamburger of any kind. You can get it in all sorts of varieties just the same as Kupo posted. Maybe pasta needs hamburger like a fish needs a bicycle?
http://www.concordextra.com/img_uploads/Crosse-Blackwell-Pasta-cheese-Brocilli-6R026C_1.jpg
@JoeB
People still won’t leave me alone about not warming up my oatmeal. Folks will go to great lengths to fault others’ food habits for some reason. Like it’s a personal affront that my pancakes are thin…
@kupo
Sounds ominous. Like mad science. It’s alive! 😀
Also, Asian Helper is the worst. Not like as a food, but as a name. How did nobody at Betty Crocker stop and think comparing (east) Asians to the scrumptious carcasses of cows was the wrong way to go?
@ Becky Hopkins If what you say is true then maybe the metaphor may be on to something in a way. Hamburger Helper is labeled as meant for ground meat, but it’s actually still okay without it.
I have used Hamburger helper before. But ever since moving out of my parents’ house, that’s been almost never since most of them need milk, and I don’t keep dairy milk in my fridge, just vanilla soy milk.
@IP
If they were capable of marketing their ideas, wait even then I doubt they would go through with the effort.
From a marketing perspective the growth of their club cannot grow beyond the “normal” exchange rate of those who become MRA and join MGTOW and leave MGTOW for various reasons. As their current modus operandi is to circle jerk ad nauseum, I cannot say with confidence that they’ll be able to compete with more extreme right wing subreddits and sites that are either thinly veiled fascists or out and about fascists in the near future.
@Axe
Well, it is chemistry. 🙂 The idea is my device cooks to a precise temperature. It’s supposed to be good for veggies and fruits because you can get it to a temperature between when the starch and pectin breaks down, but I learned that no, pears are not good that way and might as well be served raw. Better raw, actually.
And yeah, I saw that Asian Helper in that image and did s double-take.
@ Axe
If you don’t do that for horses they can die of colic; so maybe they’re just looking out for you 🙂
As the cat-lady daughter of a single mom, I don’t recall ever needing a man at all, let alone a misogynistic creep. Why do these guys think we need them, again?
Once we were Cheeseburgers and Greasy Pizza, but now…now we’re just noodles and msg.
And meatloaf needs at LEAST eggs, salt, and bread crumbs, if not also some ground pork, onion, parsley, and garlic, for it to be meatloaf and not just a dense loaf-shaped hamburger.