Struggle Meals Are Trending On Tik Tok & You Might Recognize The Greatest Hits

If you’ve ever melted shredded cheese directly onto tortilla chips or thrown a hot dog into a slice of bread, no toppings, congratulations — you’ve eaten a struggle meal. Thanks to this here economy, struggle meals are trending on Tik Tok, from people joking about going back to eating nothing but Hamburger Helper and cinnamon toast, to other creators curating grocery lists for super cheap struggle meals that’ll feed an entire family.

In case you need to catch up, struggle meals are essentially dirt cheap snacks and meals, like a fried egg on rice, buttered noodles with parmesan cheese fresh out of the shaker, or a spoonful of peanut butter as a treat. For some, they’re easy things they could make themselves to eat when they were kids; for others, they’re a sign that their families didn’t have much and were making do.

Search the hashtag #strugglemeal on Tik Tok and you’ll see tens of thousands of videos on the subject. Some users share their favorite childhood struggle meals in a nostalgic way, waxing poetic about how good a microwaved baked potato can be if only you happened to have shredded cheese in the house. This one about the masterpiece that is melted cheese on top of tortilla chips (which I have heard called poverty nachos before) racked up nearly a thousand comments.

Personally I thought these were a top-tier snack as a kid and my 4-year-old requests them all the time now. The comments agree. “For rich or poor in sickness and health, I will forever eat these,” one commenter said. “And if you lucky you got Doritos to do it with,” added another (I’m going to have to try that version now).

Other videos on struggle meals share grocery lists with pricing for a week’s worth of struggle meals on a major budget. For example, our new best friend Whitney shared a grocery list that makes five dinners for under $100 — everyone clap because she deserves it — and should provide some leftovers for lunches as well.

There are also creators like @kikirough making what she calls recession recipes: homemade Hamburger Helper, biscuits and gravy, and a dessert made with literal Saltines. Mom and creator @bugzmom8 does the same, but she calls hers low-income dinners. Zee (a.k.a. @she_writes_black) is showing followers everything you can make with lentils, which are a super affordable source of protein and fiber. As Kiki says, for some people, 2025 is their first time being poor, and not everyone may have had to think about groceries the way those of us who grew up with less intuitively do. But listen: there’s no shame in a struggle meal. If anything, they’re a sign that you’re resourceful and you’re making something good out of an imperfect situation.

Honestly, this trend is really heart-warming to me. In a world where images of wealth and picture-perfect lives dominate social media, it’s strangely intimate to see people opening up about the struggle meals they rely on to stay afloat. So much of the food shared online has some qualifier — it’s high-protein or “elevated” or simply beautiful to photograph and post, regardless of whether it takes 30 ingredients to reproduce. As someone who grew up with a single mom, I am very familiar with all the ways you can zhuzh up a 99-cent frozen pizza. I still eat struggle meals often because I have chronic fatigue; sometimes peanut butter on a tortilla is all the lunch I can manage to make. This trend is a reminder that a plate of pancakes, a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, noodles with a jar of tomato sauce — these are good meals too.