If you didn’t cook it with your own hands - don’t trust it. My mom was an old school Italian who made everything from scratch - including sauces. I was lucky enough to be raised in that environment. Bless that lady - she didn’t teach me but I watched. Today I love to cook but it’s difficult and yeah expensive… it’s not that much more if you do wise things. Today the wife and I will buy 2 whole chickens from Sams club ( 18 to 20 $ ) and carve them up ourselves into 7 or 8 bags of breasts… wings, etc ( 35 to 45 $ if you buy it individually ) . The remains will be saved for stock or broth and put in bags in the freezer. We’ve re- taken up pressure canning. Every veg we use, all the trimmings we would have thrown out is saved and used in the stocks. We got some 2.5 foot long pork tenderloins from the same place - like my forearm thick for maybe 22 $ and I cut chops and made packs of 4. I got maybe 24 chops which would have cost well over 100 $ just for the hassle of spending some time in the kitchen with some tunes and a knife. You can stretch a budget quite a ways if you don’t rely on purely convenience.
I hear that - I was around when Arche and Fido-net and BBS’es were king. You want my id? Great I’ll just fax it to you.