My partner and I have had Annie's Mac and Cheese for years now. We work long days. We're tired. We're hungry. What do we do? On occassion, we grab an Annie's and stir it up in a pot. We don't keep milk in the house, so we use either rice milk or multigrain milk. And we don't keep butter in the house, so we use Earth Balance non-transfat margarine. Add some heated veggie meatballs and a salad or steamed chard and you have a meal in about 15 mins.

I love to cook. But chopping vegetables after a long day doesn't thrill me. Annie's is one of those "dirty little secrets" that's easy, delicious, and reasonably healthy (particularly the way we prepare it). That's good enough for me.

What this article really points up is how lost the art of plain Family Cooking is -- the basics, the cheap stuff, the "everyone sits down to dinner" kind of cooking. What passes for this in most households today is a kind of fake out -- fast food, reheated chicken nuggets, instant mac and cheese, pizza.

Women have largely abandoned this kind of cooking, because most of us work full time now, and men for the most part never did it. (BTW; I want to make it clear that Family Cooking is not to be confused with Gourmet Cooking, which is the fancy ingredients, expensive stuff, show-offy kind of cooking.) Really planning for, shopping for, cooking and cleaning up after Family Cooking is a huge commitment of time and plain hard work, and it is nearly impossibe to consistently or well, if you work a 9-5 schedule, unless you like the idea of eating around 10:30 PM each evening, and try that with a toddler.

Marketers and food corporations (yes, even Crunchy Annie) were poised to take make money off all us busy professional yuppies, plus our equally driven ideals of "naturalness" and "organic foods", and Annies Mac and Cheese (purple box and bunnies and all) just took timely and terrific advantage of this. No surprise there.

I bought Annies' once, on sale, and like the author noticed that it was pretty much identical to Kraft Mac and Cheese. The allure of both is that it is brain dead easy to make -- just add water. The cheese powder is disolved pretty instantly, so no lumps. BTW: those great, creamy "real" Mac and cheese recipes are all great, but they do take longer and if you follow the author's clueless instructions, you will get nothing but clumps of partially melted cheese floating in hot milk -- something most kids (let alone adults) will NOT eat.

Real Mac and cheese is easy to make -- if you are a moderately skilled cook. For starters, as a lot of folks mentioned, you have to be able to make a white sauce (bechamel) -- that's not hard, but it does take time and a little skill wisking, and worst of all, it is something you MUST stand there and pay attention to. If you tend to a fussy toddler, or watch some TV, this will burn or get lumpy, and in both circumstances you will have an awful mess to clean up, and dinner will be late. Ditto for the noodles - if they are real (let alone whole wheat), you need to pay a little attention while they cook, so they don't overcook and get gummy. The noodles in both Kraft and Annies are parboiled, so they cook very quickly in comparison.

My late mother -- a superb home cook -- used to say she would rather make a 30 lb stuffed turkey than a pan of Macaroni and Cheese (although she could do either, and very well), because the turkey could just be shoved in the oven and pretty much left there for hours, but the Mac and Cheese needed your constant attention.

That much being said -- yes, they are the same. Yes, both Kraft and Annies is crap. No, it won't kill anyone. It's probably a little better than horrid chicken nuggets dipped in sauce. The worst of it, is that feeding your kids this kind of (very salty) junk will tend to get them reject foods that are not this creamy/salty/bland and you will get stuck making it all the time, and end up with something that is a REAL problem, which is a kid who is a picky, whiny, demanding eater -- something really epidemic among children today.

Oh -- two last things. If you hate Kraft Corporation (maybe rightly), pretty much every chain grocery makes it's own version of Instant Mac and Cheese, so you don't have to buy Annie's to avoid the corporation. This often sells 3 for $1, so when all else is said and done, Annie's a HUGE rip off.

And I am pretty sure that Kraft still makes a powdered American cheese product. This looks like Parmesan cheese, in a cardboard shaker, only the tube is orange instead of green. If this idea rocks your world, you can make all kinds of vile orange-y cheese conncotions out this, including your own instant Mac and cheese, and cheese popcorn.

The subtitle of this article asks whether Annie's is healthier and the article addresses that issue to an extent but also adds a solid dose of bitterness against rich people. For one thing, all people with money and success aren't bad. Secondly, the 'healthiness' of one product over another is, to some degree, subjective. I wasn't under the impression that people bought Annie's because they thought it was better for their diet. I suspect most people buy it because it is a more conscious version of the ol 'staple' of Kraft.

This whole article is so asinine and poorly written that I question why Salon would ever publish it in the first place.

Anastacia, enjoyed your article. You do have a point that there must be serious marketing genius behind Annie's products. However I'm still a big Annie's fan even after reading your article. My children can't eat Gluten and Annies is one of the few good tasting brands that ensures products are clearly labeled for those of us with food allergies or Celiacs. Sure I cook all my family's evening meals from scratch but where would I be without the ease and variety of being able to point out one of several frozen meals in my freezer for the babysitter to make my kids while I'm at work? There are plenty of parents with children who can't eat plain old Kraft foods (dairy or gluten allergies) and Annies is a g-dsend for parents like us. Today I do have more gluten-free options in the supermarket than in the past...but honestly Annie's is still one of the more affordable and better tasting products.