Have you ever heard the term “ingredient household”? It describes a household in which there are no ready-made snacks, just ingredients to make bigger meals. So, instead of having something quick, you have to actually take your time to make something to eat, like a sandwich or a salad. Or, simply eat all the ingredients separately.
The latter scenario is, apparently, the more common way of dealing with it. At least that’s the conclusion you might come to after seeing how many people resonated with this approach and made the #IngredientHousehold tag go viral at the end of last year.
So what snacks are we talking about? Scroll down to find out—maybe you’ll discover you’ve been living in an ingredient household all along!
“Ingredient household” is a home where you can’t find any ready-to-eat snacks, just ingredients to make bigger meals
Image credits: iscabirdd
TikTokers are now exposing their “ingredient households” by sharing all the things that are available in their fridges and pantries
Image credits: iscabirdd
Image credits: iscabirdd
Image credits: iscabirdd
Image credits: iscabirdd
Some are also sharing their creative ideas for go-to ingredient meals
Image credits: dessie.mccormick
Image credits: dessie.mccormick
Image credits: dessie.mccormick
Image credits: dessie.mccormick
And they are very creative indeed
Image credits: nobodyyy7777
Image credits: nobodyyy7777
Image credits: nobodyyy7777
Image credits: nobodyyy7777
Image credits: nobodyyy7777
Then, there are common staples that pretty much everyone from an “ingredient household” has tried out
Image credits: rjoleach
Image credits: rjoleach
Image credits: rjoleach
Image credits: rjoleach
The list of potential meals just goes on and on…
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Image credits: cecelia450
Their creativity has no bounds!
Image credits: cloudycastle0
Image credits: cloudycastle0
The true reasons why ingredient households became a thing are unknown
There are a few hypotheses out there for why some homes are ingredient households. Some people argue that snacks are expensive and buying them on top of all the other ingredients is just too pricey. Others believe it’s all remnants of diet culture and people believing that snacks are evil. But it’s important to remember that there are also socioeconomic details to be considered here.
You see, people who do have a lot of snacks in the house might not necessarily be rich. Snacks and various other pre-made food might be the only option for some households.
Snack-only households are out there as well
When talking to Parade, clinical psychologist Dr. Julie Landry pointed out that ingredient households can be considered, in a way, a luxury. That is because only people who have enough time to cook can allow themselves to stock up on ingredients. If you work long hours, you are more likely to stock up on pre-made food.
This is echoed in some TikToks that discuss the opposite of ingredient households—snack-only households. When you grow up in those, the only way to get through the day is to have enough snacks to munch on as prepared meals are a rarity.
Snacking on ingredients is maybe not as bad as it seems
While many TikToks seem to be mocking ingredient households and the choices available there, they aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, as many pre-made snacks are highly processed, avoiding them is actually good for you. Sure, it isn’t always convenient, but having a few tablespoons of peanut butter is more nutritious than a few handfuls of chips.
Still, just like with everything in life, the most ideal situation is when your fridge and pantry contents are balanced. Having ingredients to prepare a meal is crucial, but getting a few snacks for when you’re in a rush is also useful. So, maybe, let’s try to make balanced households a thing, too!
Interestingly enough, many people found this very relatable
Oh for goodness sake. So normal food is called "ingredients" now? And processed rubbish is now called what - "food"? I wish I still had that brain cell I just lost reading this stupid article.
Think the point is you have to be inventive rather than just popping open a bag. It's not a bad thing.
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In my world crackers, nacho chips, apples, cheese, cucumber etc. are snacks by themselves.
Right? Already having to cook real food to eat something is a first world problem, now peanut butter on a spoon for a snack is one too?
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When tik tok thinks they have invented things that have existed for decades.
Please don't post tiktok content. Nobody likes it and it's boring, low-quality stuff. This was on Buzzfeed earlier this week and even the buzzfeed audience thought it was bad.
I saw it there already, but when I saw this here, I came just for these comments. The way "ingredients household" was explained there made sense for all the whining: basically condiments without any way to use them because there's not anything else in the house (the pics support this). But the actual sources weren't talking about that! What is wrong with dumping chips on a plate, then cheese, and microwaving it? Nothing. Spoons of peanut butter are eaten at my house even when we have other foods because peanut butter is delicious. Not eating the leftovers is a personal choice; perfectly fine (assuming it's not moldy or bad or anything) is RIGHT THERE, and you're all, "Nah. Imma gripe instead." TikTok stuff is mostly awful, but this was particularly egregious.
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"An ingredient's household." Like a house that's owned by an ingredient. Apostrophes are important ppl.
Processed food is bad. So let's microwave some nachos with industrial cheese instead. Tik-tok, inexhaustible source of wisdom.
Yes, because natamycin, citric acid, cellulose/starch and nitrogen gas is just as bad the synthetic enrichment(because of the lost nutrition by processing) and preservatives in the macaroni, then all the stabilizers, preservatives, thickeners and more that's in Easy Mac. Seriously, theres processed and ultra-processed and ultra-processed is the major contributor of our health concerns and death from obesity and it's comorbidities.
Load More Replies...
Yes that is the alternative. Hostess cakes, endless types of chips. And endless dips for said chips.
Load More Replies... Another article that could have been a text but no, random photos of people faces instead
I've always thought of a snack as simply a small portion of food, not enough for a proper meal but enough to satisfy an urge between meals. At what point did it become synonymous with "something that takes no effort to prepare"?
I presume when corporate grocery gave it a dedicated section in the store ..
Load More Replies...
In my house, I have to fight my kid to NOT eat the leftovers. I like to save them for a second meal so I don't have to cook everyday, but he thinks they're so good that he just wants to eat them. We also plan our meals, so we know when we ate them because the list is on the fridge.
Load More Replies... More stupid TikTok posts of some idiot sticking their fat ugly faces into their phone cameras and pointing. Stop with this garbage, no one likes these posts.
I'm not sure I understand it. Don't they have bread, only ingredients to make it? But then why they have tortillas amd crackers when that's about the same as bread? In my country standard snacks is bread with lunch meat, maybe cheese and some salad.
Yeah, they are whining about the 'making' part. Oh, no, I have to WORK for a few minutes to eat! *eyeroll*
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What a horrendous attempt at an article. Most of these items could be listed as a snack on their own. Utter horse puckey.
I don't get it: Ritz crackers and tortilla chips are still processed foods
There's processed and ultra-processed. Processed is tortillas, ultra-processed is frozen taquitos. You can also have minimally processed by definition of additives. My homemade bread is processed... because it's bread, it got combined and baked... but would also be not-processed as there are no additives in my flour, no enrichment to combat the destruction of nutrients, and no preservatives... So it would be categorized as not processed by idea of commercial additives.
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They do! But you gotta monitor it or you'll be due a lot of cleaning/a new microwave
Load More Replies...
If these are ingredients, then what are snacks? Someone, please enlighten me.
It's weird that they threw the clover in. I ate clover to. Cinnamon toast and cereal were popular
No one ate sticks of dry spaghetti? Only me? Lol oh I also, if I was being fancy, I did dry saltine spread some ketchup top with whatever cheese was available put in oven for a few minutes, viola! Pizza
I did Laura, I did. I also ate dried Ramen and also bread balls, which I rolled between my fingers, just to make it interesting. These kids don't know about the "limited ingredients household."
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These comfortable youngsters sure do have a lot to choose from to make a video about! I’m sorry - I don’t know why, but this made uncomfortable. :/
Isn't this...normal? Like really. This all sounds perfectly normal. What the heck?
Saltiness w/ peanut butter, jelly w/ a bannana on the side. Apples, peanut butter, cheese, nuts & dried fruit (sometimes this is a perfect dinner). Peanut butter & jelly sandwich, toast or English muffin. Cheese casidilla. Hummus, naan & olives. Sometimes just a piece of cheese 😋
Oh the trauma of forced cooking and the lengths some people will go to avoid it. I had a co-worker whose sister hated to cook. So she didn't wean her son until he was ready to go to kindergarten. She didn't have to prepare snacks for him. Perhaps they should suggest that. Tit Tot on Tik Tok.
Fridge is the way station to the trash, no one knows how long its been there
Load More Replies... But most of these pictures ARE snacks. Talk to me when you are dipping a stick of butter into the sugar canister for a sweet tooth and eating bouillon cubes for a snack. Now I buy 50/50 snacks and food to cook, unlike my mother.
And this is bad because .... ? I was a lazy teen too, but apples and crackers and nutella and cinnamon and sliced bread and cheese and a pan (not all at once!) go a loooong way, even for a hungry teen.
We did the crackers and butter/tortilla chips and melted cheese ones. Also did cooked elbow macaroni with bouillon cubes (soup) and ice cream with corn flakes mixed in.
I make cheese "nachos" (why the quotation marks) all the time. Or quesedillas if we have soft tortillas. A can of rotel is a perfect salsa. I also love PB on Titz crackers and my son will eat buttered saltiness. He also makes cinnamon toast: toast, butter and cinnamon sugar. I have even made boxed brownies or cake and sat there and ate the batter! But I have seen a lot of videos showing that you can easily make a mug cake or cookie with just a few ingredients
Careful eating raw batters, the flour can have salmonella in it
Load More Replies...
those "clovers" taste like lemons and idk what they are called but we ate them at girl scout camp
So now anything that isn't premade processed and packaged isn't food? It's just a precursor to food, ie......an ingredient? This is absurd. Guess what, a slice of cheese is a snack. An apple is a snack. Crackers is a snack. PB on bread is a snack. A glass of milk is a snack. Leftovers is a snack. Billions of people on this planet are grateful when they get one meal a day. Wake up, people, and check your privilege.
Really? Reasons why ingredient households became a thing are unknown? They're not unknown. It's called cooking from scratch and not eating processed c**p all the time!
Wow. At least you have food. If you want something else, get a job and buy it yourself.
This was what we called stoner food in the before times. I grew up in a rural town and fast food was too far to drive and everyone was broke so we would make wonderful trash snacks in the wee hours watching Dragnet reruns.
Got a laugh out of this. I'm going to have to try the apples and Gatorade powder now
Who wants to tell them we’ve been snacking on sugar sammiches and fruit for a long, long, loooooong time.
Looks like a low income food bank kitchen 😐 ingredients are basics like eggs milk butter flour cheese etc. Things you can make a variety of foods. I know a broke as f family when I see one
Probably a very healthy household too Jessica .. remember these are snack and not breakfast, dinner, tea. It may look broke to you but these kids will cook when they are older
Load More Replies...
i call this eating disorder. Being so desperate to eat SOMEthing that you start snacking on crazy s**t.
Oh for goodness sake. So normal food is called "ingredients" now? And processed rubbish is now called what - "food"? I wish I still had that brain cell I just lost reading this stupid article.
Think the point is you have to be inventive rather than just popping open a bag. It's not a bad thing.
Load More Replies... In my world crackers, nacho chips, apples, cheese, cucumber etc. are snacks by themselves.
Right? Already having to cook real food to eat something is a first world problem, now peanut butter on a spoon for a snack is one too?
Load More Replies... When tik tok thinks they have invented things that have existed for decades.
Please don't post tiktok content. Nobody likes it and it's boring, low-quality stuff. This was on Buzzfeed earlier this week and even the buzzfeed audience thought it was bad.
I saw it there already, but when I saw this here, I came just for these comments. The way "ingredients household" was explained there made sense for all the whining: basically condiments without any way to use them because there's not anything else in the house (the pics support this). But the actual sources weren't talking about that! What is wrong with dumping chips on a plate, then cheese, and microwaving it? Nothing. Spoons of peanut butter are eaten at my house even when we have other foods because peanut butter is delicious. Not eating the leftovers is a personal choice; perfectly fine (assuming it's not moldy or bad or anything) is RIGHT THERE, and you're all, "Nah. Imma gripe instead." TikTok stuff is mostly awful, but this was particularly egregious.
Load More Replies... "An ingredient's household." Like a house that's owned by an ingredient. Apostrophes are important ppl.
Processed food is bad. So let's microwave some nachos with industrial cheese instead. Tik-tok, inexhaustible source of wisdom.
Yes, because natamycin, citric acid, cellulose/starch and nitrogen gas is just as bad the synthetic enrichment(because of the lost nutrition by processing) and preservatives in the macaroni, then all the stabilizers, preservatives, thickeners and more that's in Easy Mac. Seriously, theres processed and ultra-processed and ultra-processed is the major contributor of our health concerns and death from obesity and it's comorbidities.
Load More Replies... Yes that is the alternative. Hostess cakes, endless types of chips. And endless dips for said chips.
Load More Replies... Another article that could have been a text but no, random photos of people faces instead
I've always thought of a snack as simply a small portion of food, not enough for a proper meal but enough to satisfy an urge between meals. At what point did it become synonymous with "something that takes no effort to prepare"?
I presume when corporate grocery gave it a dedicated section in the store ..
Load More Replies... In my house, I have to fight my kid to NOT eat the leftovers. I like to save them for a second meal so I don't have to cook everyday, but he thinks they're so good that he just wants to eat them. We also plan our meals, so we know when we ate them because the list is on the fridge.
Load More Replies... More stupid TikTok posts of some idiot sticking their fat ugly faces into their phone cameras and pointing. Stop with this garbage, no one likes these posts.
I'm not sure I understand it. Don't they have bread, only ingredients to make it? But then why they have tortillas amd crackers when that's about the same as bread? In my country standard snacks is bread with lunch meat, maybe cheese and some salad.
Yeah, they are whining about the 'making' part. Oh, no, I have to WORK for a few minutes to eat! *eyeroll*
Load More Replies... What a horrendous attempt at an article. Most of these items could be listed as a snack on their own. Utter horse puckey.
I don't get it: Ritz crackers and tortilla chips are still processed foods
There's processed and ultra-processed. Processed is tortillas, ultra-processed is frozen taquitos. You can also have minimally processed by definition of additives. My homemade bread is processed... because it's bread, it got combined and baked... but would also be not-processed as there are no additives in my flour, no enrichment to combat the destruction of nutrients, and no preservatives... So it would be categorized as not processed by idea of commercial additives.
Load More Replies... They do! But you gotta monitor it or you'll be due a lot of cleaning/a new microwave
Load More Replies... If these are ingredients, then what are snacks? Someone, please enlighten me.
It's weird that they threw the clover in. I ate clover to. Cinnamon toast and cereal were popular
No one ate sticks of dry spaghetti? Only me? Lol oh I also, if I was being fancy, I did dry saltine spread some ketchup top with whatever cheese was available put in oven for a few minutes, viola! Pizza
I did Laura, I did. I also ate dried Ramen and also bread balls, which I rolled between my fingers, just to make it interesting. These kids don't know about the "limited ingredients household."
Load More Replies... These comfortable youngsters sure do have a lot to choose from to make a video about! I’m sorry - I don’t know why, but this made uncomfortable. :/
Isn't this...normal? Like really. This all sounds perfectly normal. What the heck?
Saltiness w/ peanut butter, jelly w/ a bannana on the side. Apples, peanut butter, cheese, nuts & dried fruit (sometimes this is a perfect dinner). Peanut butter & jelly sandwich, toast or English muffin. Cheese casidilla. Hummus, naan & olives. Sometimes just a piece of cheese 😋
Oh the trauma of forced cooking and the lengths some people will go to avoid it. I had a co-worker whose sister hated to cook. So she didn't wean her son until he was ready to go to kindergarten. She didn't have to prepare snacks for him. Perhaps they should suggest that. Tit Tot on Tik Tok.
Fridge is the way station to the trash, no one knows how long its been there
Load More Replies... But most of these pictures ARE snacks. Talk to me when you are dipping a stick of butter into the sugar canister for a sweet tooth and eating bouillon cubes for a snack. Now I buy 50/50 snacks and food to cook, unlike my mother.
And this is bad because .... ? I was a lazy teen too, but apples and crackers and nutella and cinnamon and sliced bread and cheese and a pan (not all at once!) go a loooong way, even for a hungry teen.
We did the crackers and butter/tortilla chips and melted cheese ones. Also did cooked elbow macaroni with bouillon cubes (soup) and ice cream with corn flakes mixed in.
I make cheese "nachos" (why the quotation marks) all the time. Or quesedillas if we have soft tortillas. A can of rotel is a perfect salsa. I also love PB on Titz crackers and my son will eat buttered saltiness. He also makes cinnamon toast: toast, butter and cinnamon sugar. I have even made boxed brownies or cake and sat there and ate the batter! But I have seen a lot of videos showing that you can easily make a mug cake or cookie with just a few ingredients
Careful eating raw batters, the flour can have salmonella in it
Load More Replies... those "clovers" taste like lemons and idk what they are called but we ate them at girl scout camp
So now anything that isn't premade processed and packaged isn't food? It's just a precursor to food, ie......an ingredient? This is absurd. Guess what, a slice of cheese is a snack. An apple is a snack. Crackers is a snack. PB on bread is a snack. A glass of milk is a snack. Leftovers is a snack. Billions of people on this planet are grateful when they get one meal a day. Wake up, people, and check your privilege.
Really? Reasons why ingredient households became a thing are unknown? They're not unknown. It's called cooking from scratch and not eating processed c**p all the time!
Wow. At least you have food. If you want something else, get a job and buy it yourself.
This was what we called stoner food in the before times. I grew up in a rural town and fast food was too far to drive and everyone was broke so we would make wonderful trash snacks in the wee hours watching Dragnet reruns.
Got a laugh out of this. I'm going to have to try the apples and Gatorade powder now
Who wants to tell them we’ve been snacking on sugar sammiches and fruit for a long, long, loooooong time.
Looks like a low income food bank kitchen 😐 ingredients are basics like eggs milk butter flour cheese etc. Things you can make a variety of foods. I know a broke as f family when I see one
Probably a very healthy household too Jessica .. remember these are snack and not breakfast, dinner, tea. It may look broke to you but these kids will cook when they are older
Load More Replies... i call this eating disorder. Being so desperate to eat SOMEthing that you start snacking on crazy s**t.
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