A Review of Hamburger Helper: Past, Present, and Future Bowel Movements
By aperturius | Posted in • Opinion • Products
In this, the most prestigious of websites, various foodstuffs have been studied before. Two of note include Future’s buoyant, positive, almost giddy description of what others have described as simply “shit,” that economical marvel of modern science Potted Meat Food Product. The other has been my own glowing review of cheese, in an easy to read, neat, succinct poem consisting of utter nonsense. The following review is a product that is a marriage, of sorts, of these two substances. I wish to now throw you into the mysterious world of Hamburger Helper.
Eating Hamburger Helper is truly an experience that leads to both wonderful and horrible things. If this is not your opinion, obviously you have been dining with the wrong people. I will explain later. Because of this, and because I want to be as detailed as I can about every aspect of a Hamburger Helper evening, from preparation of the meal to twelve hours later, when your bowels clench in a frightening, painful bout of extreme constipation, to some of the history of the Helper product itself, this is going to be a rather long article. Plus, due to the many stages of an HH experience, this article will contain a rating for each stage, as well as for overall effect. If you have important things to do, I would suggest you cancel them immediately. To live without this information for even five more minutes could prove fatal to you or someone you love, or at least someone you are curious about.
To those who have been living in a cave, or to those poor souls who believe they should only cook and eat “pure” foods that do not come prepackaged (think of all the TV time you’re wasting!), allow me to explain what Hamburger Helper is. As the name suggests, the package contains all one needs to make a pound or two of ground hamburger meat into a complete meal. There are many tasty varieties, but in general a package includes noodles, usually of a spiral variety, a “seasoning packet,” in which the leftovers thrown on the Betty Crocker production floor are swept, and in most cases a “cheese packet” which contains powdered cheese taken from the rare Powdered Cows of eastern Bolivia.
Turn on the oven, brown up your meat, add your extras plus a little milk to make the cheese come alive, and you’ve got grub! Oh, if it were only that easy. My first suggestion to each and every one of you is: if you are to partake in a meal of Hamburger Helper with friends, DO NOT be the one to prepare it! Don’t even enter the damn kitchen while this stuff is on the oven! I don’t care what excuse you have to come up with! Don’t get near it! Hamburger Helper, while it is cooking, looks like…oh, how should I put this…like FUCKING-ASS PUKE. For comparison, or for an interesting science fair project, eat a couple of double cheeseburgers dripping wet with grease, stuff down some macaroni and cheese after that, wash it all down with six glasses of milk, and then spend the rest of the night getting completely hammered. What you find in your toilet in the morning is precisely the same as a batch of Hamburger Helper on the stove. Seconds, anyone?
Now comes what can actually be the fun part, eating Hamburger Helper. Once it is off the oven, something interesting happens to HH, something that causes its eaters to scarf it down a bit more quickly than they perhaps normally would with something with the fat content that rivals the entire Hershey Chocolate production plant. Helper, in room temperature, begins to congeal until its consistency is that of a large chunk of lead on the bottom of the ocean floor. When eating, it is best not to think of this and just enjoy the flavor, which has to be its only saving grace. Put simply, if you like meat and cheese, you will like Hamburger Helper. The noodles are there only to add a certain pleasant chewiness, and any random vegetable that may be in it, you will be relieved to know, has been stripped of any nutritional value by the truckloads of preservatives and Yellow #5 included in each heart-stopping serving. One box of this stuff goes pretty evenly between three people (especially if at least two of them are gluttonous oxen of men who could swallow their shoelaces during a meal and not notice) and I would not suggest throwing this amount of “food” on less than that many, as the risk of taking seconds may be too great for the average aorta to handle. But all in all, the actual dining experience of a serving of Hamburger Helper, especially if you are blind, can be very pleasurable indeed.
The post-dining experience, however, could cause some weaker souls to contemplate painful forms of suicide. Remember how I mentioned the tendency of Hamburger Helper to congeal as it cools? I have no reason to believe that this process stops once it enters your stomach. If there are any men out there who have ever been curious as to what it must feel like to be pregnant, just eat a plateful of Three Cheese Hamburger Helper. You will instantly gain ten pounds and a throbbing pain in your abdomen, I assure you. However, the eventual passing of this heaping load in your belly is much more difficult and agonizing than any childbirth in history. If HH and Ex-Lax were to ever join forces and combine each in the same package, they could make a Bill Gates-size fortune. Of course, the Betty Crocker company has never made any promises to the contrary about its product’s nutritional value. They know exactly what they are selling to us, and they know that most of us are ready to accept it.
Hamburger Helper was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public back in 1961. Television had just started to make huge waves about ten years prior, and the makers of consumer products had begun to realize that America was becoming a faster-paced environment where people had many things to do, and only five minutes of commercial time in which to do them. Swanson had its flash-frozen TV dinners, but what about those women who still wanted to feel like they were cooking something, but still wanted time to escape from the house and their controlling 9 to 5 husbands, and spend some quality moments in the arms of their 10-year-younger, rebellious, leather-jacketed boyfriends? Betty Crocker had just the thing for them.
However, Betty knew that she could expand her Hamburger horizons with a good marketing ploy, a commercial character that the public would enjoy seeing as well as wondering, “What the hell is THAT supposed to be?” In 1977, the Helping Hand was born. No more than a walking, gloved left hand with four fingers that sported eyes, a mouth, and a red clown nose, the Helping Hand was there on our dining room table to remind us that Hamburger Helper “makes a great meal.” From commercial to commercial, he donned the apparel and accents of a Spanish, French, and even a Russian person to help us, the consumer, enjoy the tastes of the world, as long as all those tastes involved hamburger, pasta, and cheese in some way. I enjoyed the Helping Hand spots over the years, and only blamed myself for wondering why a disembodied hand with only four fingers would pitch a product whose main ingredient was ground animal meat. Again, best not to think about it.
These are still fast-paced times, and television is still important to us all, but we have also become a health-conscious bunch. We are still willing to eat our weight in fat, but now it is important to try to work most of that off afterwards. That is why an evening of Hamburger Helper with two of my best friends, Jason and Diana, has become so important to me. For a time during college, Saturday night was designated “Hamburger Helper Night.” It consisted of nothing more than heaping platefuls of the stuff while drinking beer, shooing the cats away from our meal (evidently they mistake it for cat food, I can’t imagine why), and watching what is invariably going to be another painfully unfunny episode of Saturday Night Live. It’s great.
Following that, if we have the strength to get up, the three of us and whoever else may be guests at the time take a brisk stroll downtown for what we have lovingly dubbed, the “slut-watch.” There are many rules to this game, and the scoring system can be very complicated, but generally what it consists of is walking around and making fun of the abundance of sluts who wear too little and fuck too much in our humble little college town. There’s no better way I can think of to work off a completely disgusting meal than by walking past a whole crowd of future disgusting meals for drunken jocks in the chill night air. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it. And with that, I invite you all to experience this all for yourself and buy a pack’o meat and a box of Hamburger Helper from your local supermarket. Enjoy folks, and have your cardiologists’ number handy.
Ratings:
Preparation of Hamburger Helper:
Zero Monkeys
The first fifteen minutes of eating Hamburger Helper before it congeals too much:
Three Monkeys
The After-Dinner Stomachache:
Negative Two Monkeys
Slut-Watch on a Good Night:
.
The Entire Hamburger Helper Saturday Experience:
Priceless
What our staff thinks:
Andy Warhol: “There’s a reason I never used Hamburger Helper packages in my artwork. My friends in the Factory kept stealing the boxes and snorting the powdered cheese when they ran out of drugs!”
The Crocodile Hunter: “Blimey, I learned my lesson! Never eat that bloomin’ stuff before you hop into a pit of hungry crocs! That disembodied Helping Hand bugger used to be attached to ME!!”
Resources:
Pudge’s Homemade Hamburger Helper
The Untold Story of the Hand
Betty Crocker
Captain America’s lost love: So Stan Lee thought it would be great to bring back an old character from the ‘40s. Great, just say that he’s been frozen in a block of ice for 20 years, happens all the time. The problem I have with the Captain is his one-dimensional creepy personality. He’s after Baron Zemo, an old nazi war criminal for killing his boy sidekick Bucky. I hate boy sidekicks. I really do. And I really really hate the fact that all of Captain America’s thought balloons are filled with pictures of Bucky and words of weeping. He’ll never get over losing Bucky; Bucky was the most precious guy in the world, etc. Stop being such a girl, Captain America! He has decided to start hanging around with a new young boy named Rick Jones. He and Rick practice “acrobatic tricks” and “fighting maneuvers.” Read between the lines people. Not healthy behavior for any grown man, let alone a so-called super-hero. There is a great scene where Rick dresses up as Bucky and Cap freaks out. He demands that Rick take off the costume and starts sobbing. Baron Zemo was trying to do you a favor by offing your sidekick, ok? You don’t need another one.
Baron Zemo: He’s a really great villain in my opinion. Think Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, except wearing a hideous purple costume and having a pink hood permanently stuck on his head. He comes up with retarded plans of world domination, like spraying the streets of Manhattan with super-glue, and then bitching and moaning when his plans don’t work. He throws temper tantrums and kicks things out of frustrating…like walls and cute little kittens. He also rules a small village in South America, which is where he keeps his precious, precious treasure. One memorable scene has him looking in his big treasure chest when no one is around and worrying that everyone wants his gold. He is a delusional paranoid, but I love him.
Resources:
