03/04/04’s illustrious band:

Toodles to Noodles

Brought to you by Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. It’s the cheesiest.

Kraft mac & cheese has been part of my gustatory life for as long as I can recall. It’s one of the first foods I remember eating. It’s the first dish I learned to cook from a recipe, carefully measuring the 1/4 cup of milk and 1/4 stick of butter into one of Mother Media’s grey metal pots and stirring with a long-handled wooden spoon. It’s the first recipe I memorized, and I know it still. When I was old enough not only to babysit Sister-san, but to cook her dinner, too, it became the first food I prepared for someone else. (In what can only be called a miraculous coincidence, Kraft introduced spiral macaroni noodles in 1975, the same year Sister-san was born.)

When I ditched my college dorm for my first solo apartment, Kraft mac & cheese came with me. A thrifty student, I tried the generic store macaroni dinners, but none of them lived up to the gold standard set by Kraft. I cooked several boxes of it a week in my tiny basement room, where I had to unplug the refrigerator while using the microwave to avoid blowing a fuse. By that time I had grown savvy enough to combine the water-boiling step with the noodle-boiling step, cooking both at once to save myself some important study time. Some times I mixed in a hot dog for protein. I drained the pasta in the bathroom sink because that was the only sink I had, then mixed everything up in the cooking bowl and ate from it as well. I washed my dish immediately afterward, too, because it was too big to leave in the sink.

When I went to grad school, I carried my mac across the country, and when I moved back to the Midwest after completing my studies, mac came too. In every apartment and house I’ve lived in, I’ve dined on this staple. It’s a thread of continuity reaching back to a happy childhood. If a person could have a food security blanket, Kraft mac & cheese would be mine.

Since I came to work for the Award-Winning Health Magazine, my macaroni consumption has declined. As I’ve grown more aware of its nutritional attributes, or lack thereof, I’ve eaten it less and less. When I decided to nix processed white flour and white pasta from my diet, I cut the Kraft almost entirely. But I’d still pick up the familiar blue and yellow box, reminiscent of the azure skies and golden grain fields of my South Dakota home, every couple months when I needed a little comfort food. It was OK to indulge once in a while.

Alas, my relationship with my longtime love had begun to sour in recent months. The less white flour and white pasta I ate, the more I noticed a cardboardy aftertaste whenever I did have some. Most pizza crusts and many cookies, for instance, have become unpalatable, throwing me into paroxysms of junk food withdrawal. But I could still turn back to my mac; the fluorescent powdered cheez covered the pasta’s sins. Mac was always there for me.

Until last night. Last night I broke up with Kraft mac & cheese for good. It was a wet, chilly night and I had a lot of work to do. I wanted something quick, easy, and friendly for dinner, so naturally I turned to my old standby. After months apart, I expected the usual happy reunion.

But it was awful. Awful! I couldn’t tell whether I was eating the macaroni or the box it came in. Or perhaps I had tucked in to a pile of salty orange Kleenex. I ate half a dozen bites and threw the rest out, and then carried the garbage outside. The woody fallout lingered all evening in my mouth and nose, not to be vanquished by either red wine or dark chocolate. My mac done me wrong. We can never be together again. It’s the end of an era.

Farewell, old friend. We’ll always have Paris, won’t we? Sniff.

Click here to read about the history of Kraft mac & cheese.

Today around the world: March 4 is Town Meeting Day in Vermont.

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