...this lazy Dad will make Trader Joe's mac and cheese (which for all I know IS Annie's) and add peas, tomatoes, and ham.

While the pasta is cooking hold a tomato over another burner to peel them. After peeling toss it and some frozen peas right in the boiling water with the pasta. It all stays together in the colander when you drain.

Make the "cheese sauce" (I add grated romano or parmesan) back on the stove (same pot), using more milk or cream than you normally would. When it's hot stir in the pasta, peas, and tomato, then drop in some diced ham (sorry -- we're ham eaters) and let it heat and come together.

Yes, it has too much salt in it. No, we aren't smug about it. We do it about twice a month -- it's a decent, easy way to get at least a modicum of nutrition into an otherwise empty meal. We've never made it any other way, so our kid expects and eats the peas and ham.

Just a suggestion. It's really, really, easy. Yes, I know we could just boil pasta -- we do that, too. But sometimes they want the fun shapes.

Annies now makes bright orange mac & cheese, using annatto to get the orange coloring.

I've recently decided to begin trying the cheaper generic versions of some of my favorite foods. Popcorn, frozen veggies, cheese. An you know what? Everything I cook tastes just the same, but I save lots of money every month! We are such suckers for packaging and cool graphics on the front of a box! I'm a graphic artist and do that crap for a living, so trust me. Stick it to the man and buy generic!

I highly recommend everyone read Barry Glassner's new Gospel of Food, subtitled Everything You Think You Know About Food is Wrong. An antidote to all the received wisdom of the food police who insist that all the tasty ingredients in our diet are bad for us (wrong), that fast food is inherently fattier and more caloric than the food in fine restaurants (wrong), and that our upper-middle class diet is the way to go for our lower-class brethren (wrong, but ongoing for a hundred years).

Galssner is a sociologist from USC who wrote The Culture of Fear. I am a food snob who enjoyed being taken down a notch by this book.

Annie's is better than Kraft and its knockoffs for one reason: it may not be a nutritional powerhouse, but it *is not poison.* The artificial colors and flavors in Kraft's etc. place it outside the boundaries of food for any educated buyer.

It must be a slow news day if Salon has to publish this inane nitpicking.

I really didn’t expect anyone to defend Annie’s as health food. Your kids may like it, your boyfriend may prefer it and it might not be pure evil in a blue box – but it’s still junk food. I thought we all knew that. But so many people are fighting that it’s junk food! That’s just funny to me. I didn’t really get this article until I started reading the responses.

It’s cool that you let your kids eat junk food every once in a while. But it’s not cool to convince yourself (and them) that it’s better just because it costs a buck more.

We do not feed our kids Annie's Mac and Cheese because we think it's health food. We feed it to them because we need something very quick on a busy evening. We choose it over Kraft because the ingredient list is less disgusting, the color is less in-your-face artificial and the kids like it. Plus, when you add your own parmesan to it, it can be tasty.

Since when is macaroni and cheese a meal? It is clearly not made out of enough food groups to constitute an entire meal. Even with the low-budget processed food my family ate when I was a kid, mac and cheese was always used as a side dish that went along with things like turkey, or a hamburger, or some other protein-based main dish. Would you eat just mashed potatoes for a meal? Or just stuffing?

Annie's, Kraft, store-brand, homemade, whatever: mac and cheese is part of a meal, not a meal unto itself.

The following is the ingredient list for Kraft Macaroni and cheese:

Ingredients: ENRICHED MACARONI PRODUCT (DURUM WHEAT FLOUR, WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE, THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), CHEESE SAUCE MIX (WHEY, GRANULAR AND CHEDDAR CHEESE [MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES], WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SALT, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE, CITRIC ACID, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6).

Admittedly, the phosphates and the food colorings don't seem all that natural, but I'm not sure that it makes it "poison." Where's the arsenic, dioxins, polonium, etc.?

Thank you Ms. Marx de Salcedo for finally pointing out the fact that making real mac and cheese is no more complicated than the boxed "instant" variety. I've always found it amazing that Kraft has been able to dupe us all into thinking that their mac and cheese dinner is easy to make.

And if anyone actually thinks that a cheese powder can provide any sort of nutrition then they need some schooling on food. Some posters have mentioned that it's better than Kraft because this or that. But it's really the better of two evils, is it not?

I won't repeat the good and interesting points that many posters have already said. Rather I'd like to say that if you want to give your kids nutritious food that's simple to prepare you don't have to buy pre-packaged or pre-prepared products. Plus kids will eat what you teach them to eat. And if you teach them from an early age what is truly good for them and tasty too it will last a lifetime.

Stop defending corporations and start defending real natural products like fresh egg-pasta, real cheddar cheese, sea salt and fresh milk. Then you'll have mac and cheese to remember. And you'll probably save money too, even if you buy organic.