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

Hamburger Helper was not “unleashed” on the public in 1961, it was first put on shelves in 1970.

Just thought you should get your story straight.

Thank you so very kindly for your attention to detail.  Obviously our reputation would be tainted if people were led to believe that we made up “facts” used in our articles or simply purged them from the nearest sphyncter.

Indeed, the ramifications of this poor judgement in research could affect our webratings and have them shaken to the core such that this website would be ridiculed if reports of such fallicy were to make it to highgrounds of internet accuracy as Fark.com, for example.

Thank you for bringing this misrepresentation of fact to our attention.  We hope that you, dear reader, forgive us for the error of our ways and we promise to make every effort to uphold fake journalistic standards in the highest light in future critically analytical articles.

Ashamed,
Hollywood

Where can I buy the hamburger helper mascot?

What is the deal between Betty Crocker and General Mills both having Hamburger Helper as a product?  I noticed the hand thingy only appearing on General Mill’s version, but Betty had everything trademarker etc.  So what’s the deal . . . do they both own it?

I loved your editorial on Hamburger Helper.  Very funny, and brings back so many horrible memories.  I’m definitely going to tell friends about your article.  However in your article you mention making HH on the “oven”, but it’s actually made via “stovetop.” Just a little
FYI : - )

this is some great pictures you got here they are relly funny. hahahahahaha

Hey!  I have found an old package of Hamburger Helper in my Grandmother’s cupboard. I’m trying to get a timeline of how old it is. The packaging looks really old and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was from the 1970’s.  Can someone help me find a site of Hamburger History packaging?

i love hamburger helper i dont care what anyone says. however, my friends and i call it “a** destroyer in a box”.

Hamburger Helper Rocks

I found a hamburger helper hand in a stuffed toy box the tag attached says amimal fair inc. 1976 could it be that old?

I have 2 platefulls of Meijer brand stroganoff helper coursing through my digestive system. This whole thing just makes it soo worth it!

Here’s a helpful husband hint for wonderful Hambergar Hell-par!
I frequent the marquet to purchase my Tomatah Penne Pastah. It’s the best. Now here’s the cooking hints - Only 18 oz. of watah and 1.2 lbs. of grrrround beefy meats (use 93% lean beef - it’s fantastico). When you brown your grrrrround beefy meats, you really want to add a touch of olive oil and then grind it really fine with a spatulah - which can take several minutes. I made a batch today and spent about 5 minutes ah-choppin’ at the meet with a pointy-edges spatulah which made the particles really fine. The reason for this is that as it reabsorbs the fat as coating for the meat, it will start to sizzle and get a wonderful sllllllight crunchiness to it - for a great tactile sensation.
The pan will sizzle a bit. Now add the 18oz. of water (make sure it’s hot), seasoning packet and fantastic penne pastas. Now here’s the kicker - also add the following - about 1/8 cup of each: parsley, oregano, and basil. Now, do not cook as long as the package dictates - first brrrring everything to a boil (as stated) and thenback the heat off to about 30%. DO NOT SIMMER FOR 15 minutes. Simmer for about 10 minutes. It makes a difference. Sample the sauce - go ahead - and keep that tongue in your mouth. WHat a treat! You can also finish it off when werving with a fine freshly grrrrated cheeeeese. You will not be able to stop eating this. It is the best.

Now, when you’re ready to move on, I’ll tell you the secret to making Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee 98% fat free beef ravioli the most down to Italy dish you ever tasted. The secret is..…

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a big fan and an avid consumer of Hamburger Helper, it is truly delicious.  I am also a big fan of the “Hamburger Helper Stuffed Hand Toy,” If there is anyone that can help and assist me in researching and looking for a “Hamburger Helper Stuffed Hand Toy” to purchase for my unique collection that I presently have.

Frank A. Lopez
(650) 364-5073
E-mail: franklopez15@yahoo.com

what ever happened to the bbq beef hamburger helper it was the best one