Of course Annie's isn't healthy, or natural. It comes in a box with powdered cheese product, for God's sake. It's no big secret that most of the "natural" products (even the ones that feature bucolic scenes and feel-good stories of family farms on the box) are owned by corporations like General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft and Mars. That's right - when you buy Seeds of Change pasta sauce, you are giving your money to the maker of M&Ms. At least (for now) Annie's is it's own company, so I don't have to worry about how my dollars that are meant to support a responsible business model are actually going to support the killing of workers in Guatemala or some other such traditional corporate practice.

As long as our society is structured so that many of us have to work long hours for little pay these convenience foods will always have a big market. If we're going to spend the money, we may as well make a better choice, no matter how marginally better it is.

And what's with all the anger towards Annie? So she has great marketing skills and takes advantage of business opportunities - does that make her evil? It's our responsibility as consumers to know where our money is going.

Loved this... still buy and will continue to, Annie's pasta, eat it myself, don't give it to the grandkids.....and frankly I'd rather my money go to Annie's pocket than the giant Kraft coffers even though her stuff costs a tad more, you rock Annie, keep on going to the bank with my hard-earned pasta-buyin' dollars!! All this organic stuff has gotten way too serious anyhow....milk I draw the line, it must be the BIG O!!!

I laughed my way through this article--I don't disagree with it, but it was so amusingly written (particularly about learning to grate cheese).

An essential missing idea of why the eco-conscious among us flock to Annie's mac-n-cheese (don't forget college students, whom I suspect make up a healthy portion of consumers) is the fact that it's simply NOT Kraft. Kraft is owned by Phillip-Morris (sorry, the Altria Group) and all their evil tobacco connections. Boxed mac and cheese is, yes, both easy and delicious, but before Annie's it was difficult to find alternative brands that were also both delicious and easy. Annie's filled that niche with a scrubby, do-gooder feel.

The fact that she sold her companies and has tie-ins with corporate artists... must you insist that "natural" foods and capitalism be mutually exclusive? She made a successful product that is simply better. We should applaud that, with all it's shortcomings.

Loved this letter, starting with.. "Last night I made a cheese sauce. It took me about 10 minutes and left me with just a few dishes. I drank a glass of wine and had a chat with my husband while I was doing it."

and ending with...

"Of course I don’t have children."

Well, then, just can it, OK? We parents are quite aware of the compromises we make. We don't need your crap too.

As a 20-something who is trying not to spend all of my expendable income on dining out every night, I went through a phase where I bought up all the mac & cheese boxes at Whole Foods to eat for dinner. A dinner for only $3? Suze Orman would approve. But after about 2 weeks of eating a box of mac & cheese nightly (each box contains about 1000 calories), I noticed that I was fat, bloated and feeling a little depressed. I told a friend about my recent diet changes and consequent physical changes, and she told me that my diet of mac & cheese has been linked to childhood autism (she has a masters in developmental psychology). Based on how crappy I was feeling at the time, I didn't think it was as far-fetched as it sounded. After that forray into saving money and eating cheap "organic" food from boxes, I never touched the stuff again. My waist line and my mental health are all the better for it.

Pls tell me what you define as a Regan Era Zeitgeist? Thanks.

Bauhaus

With a daintily moistened forefinger, Anastacia tested the winds of popular culture and felt the breeze of hippie-bashing. Yes, she realized, snark sells--especially to the boho-hipster readers she hoped to build her career on! Her next article would make fun of people who tried to feed their kids as well as they could, given limited time and resources. In fact, she'd also make fun of them for having limited time and resources!

Okay, some readers whimper, but it's not a very good article. But writing a good article is just as easy as writing a snarky rant, isn't it? Let's take a look:

Good article:

1. Research subject. Maybe talk to a parent who serves it, or a nutritional expert who has something to say about the extra ingredients in Kraft's product.

2. Interview Annie or someone at Annie's company.

3. Do an honest comparison of cooking and cleanup time between making "real" mac 'n' cheese and making the boxed stuff.

4. Write a tight, focused, well-supported article.

Anastacia's article:

1. Wave away any concerns with a bunch of straw-man characterizations of parents and unsupported approval of the ingredients in Kraft mac 'n' cheese.

2. Make shit up about Annie and her motivations.

3. Compare the boxed cheese to some totally bogus "recipe" for the homemade stuff that would result in a gloppy mess no kid would eat.

4. Cover all with adjective after adverb after descriptor and hope nobody notices there's no substance underneath.

Hmm, maybe writing a good article isn't just as easy after all. Oh well.

A few letter writers who are parents have written that they serve their kids Annie's mac and cheese because they are too busy to cook.

My question is, why have kids if you cannot take the time to feed them decently?

Okay, flame away, but consider the question, too.

Please tell me that post was a joke. In case it wasn't:

1) 1000 calories of *anything* consumed in a single meal will make you gain weight, assuming you're also eating other stuff throughout the day. Gluttony, not macaroni and cheese, is the culprit.

2) Autism is now linked to mac & cheese? I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The reason why you felt like crap is not because the mac-cheese was destroying your neurons, it's because you were *overeating*.

3) Organic doesn't mean healthy, it means without pesticides and other non-naturally-occuring chemicals in your food. If I ate nothing but organic potato chips I would still wind up just as dead from heart failure as if I'd eaten artificially processed chips.