why are people denying the fact that they buy Annie's mac 'n cheese thinking, deep inside, that the product is "healthier" or "better" than the Kraft product? there is a smugness in that choice. of course you know that annie's is not healthfood, but most consumers of the product think that it is superior to Kraft -- even though it is not.

i love articles like this (and others like it that expose Horizon milk and Muir Glen products, etc. for what they really are) and hope that it will remind people that shopping at whole foods or driving a subaru does not make you a better person. eat the food b/c you like it, but leave the judgment behind.

I make homemade mac and cheese on occasion. I've developed an elaborate recipe based partially on a souffle recipe (sans the beaten egg white). It makes a rich and decadent macaroni and cheese that is infinitely changeable (I use irish chedder and raclette, but you can use any cheese you want, sometimes I add spinach or toasted almonds or little bits of squash). It takes many pans and considerable time, but the results are worth it.

Except my boyfriend, who usually likes anything I make, just doesn't care for it. He prefers the box kind. Fine.

Sometimes I'll spend hours making homemade pumpkin pasta, rolling it by hand, cutting it. I'll serve it in a cream sauce spiked with gorgonzola, roasted pears and hazelnuts.

Sometimes, I just want a box of mac and cheese slathered in Frank's hot sauce.

Not every meal has to be gourmet and not every meal has to be all natural pseudo intellectual smugness. Find the balance!

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. We talked about Hillary’s chances in ’08 (not good). I used fancy cheese. I’ve often thought the Cheese Council (or whoever makes the cheese ads) should teach this little recipe in a 30 second slot. It’s really easy. I poured my cheese sauce over a baked potato (no dishes) but stove-top mac and cheese would have only added an easy to clean pot and strainer to the mess.

My dad taught me how to make a white sauce when I was a little girl. I think it was the first thing I learned how to make. This little recipe really did teach me a love of cooking and helping in the kitchen. Its magic when a few staples you always have in the house become this delicious food. Recently I’ve gotten into soufflés. It turns out a soufflé is just a flavored white sauce folded into a few egg whites. It’s all so easy and wholesome and inexpensive when you’ve got the fundamentals down.

It’s short sighted to only be talking about an extra 5 minutes or another dirty pot. You’re teaching your kids a love of food and eating with almost no extra effort by going this one extra step. And you can all enjoy the same good food. I never turned up my nose at a homemade cheese sauce as a kid because I’d made that cheese sauce and I’d choose the cheese and the pasta shapes. It was just another easy, cheap dinner – nothing too fancy that I needed to ‘just try.’

Of course I don’t have children. I’m sure I’ll see the charm in the zone-out-and-just-feed-them mentality if I ever do. But I hope I manage to teach them how to make and appreciate a proper white sauce too.

Annie's is actually healthier, when you prepare it like the directions say. The author might want to learn how to read a nutritional statement...

My kids love the taste, not just of the mac, but of many of the products including their cookies. We have tried most of the "evil genius's" products and we like most all of them. I particularly love that the product is not Kraft like: ie full of colors not found in nature, chemicals, and cheese created in a lab by little men in white coats with clipboards.

Hey, and why not support the little guy that strives to be more socially responsible than the faceless corporations that have been happliy stuffing our now world's fattest kids with crap since the invention of "convenience food"

I buy organic when I can. Is it healthier? hell I do not know but if you gave my kid the opportunity to suck on a pesticide popsicle, I would probably pass on that, so at least I am consistent

Harry

"Next-to-last paragraph (before the white sauce recipe): 'Withey's company acquired it's doppelgänger.' "

The above is not a complete sentence. I understand that the misplaced apostrophe you sought to corrected is not your error, but the lack of a verb is.

"How could you have gotten the umlaut correct yet miss that?"

You've mixed up the tense in this one.

"(This was yet another reason why I dropped my subscription; but that's another letter, which I already wrote, which I never got a response to.)"

You really don't need a semicolon before a conjunction, and the last part of this should read, " . . . to which I never got a response." "Received" would be a better choice than "got."

I admire your resolution to cook healthy, organic food. Just don't correct people's grammar unless you absolutely know what you're doing, because it only invites comebacks from mean people like me.

-LZ

I've made home made mac and cheese - even baked, for my family. My husband is the one who buys the boxes of processed food stuff. He prefers it having grown-up with it; his mother never made the real stuff. Mine did. So when Dad is home, if it's mac and cheese, it's boxed. Mind you, very few nights do we bother with it. It's extremely easy to grill something up with a standard marinade or make a stir fry. And if we do have it, we have it with real veggies and protein (usually tofu, which my kids love.) I can't believe anyone who has ever given their child boxed mac and cheese believes it is a healthy meal. The left overs do heat up quickly for a snack before their plain old middle class urban kid swimming lessons.