Tag: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

Is It Live or Is It Memorex?

It’s the wood chipper for you, buddy.

New Year’s Day has come and gone (and a warm welcome to you, 2021), which means it’s time my wife and I take down the Christmas tree. For some, taking down the tree means disconnecting the branches from the trunk, the trunk from the base, and packing the whole thing into a cardboard box to be used again next year. For us, taking down the tree means lifting it off the stand, hauling it outside to the truck, driving it over to the drop-off lot, and donating $5 to fund the recycling. Yes, this year – as with all of my years – the Christmas tree is real, not artificial.

I’m not here today to debate real vs. artificial Christmas trees.  They both have pros and cons and your choice rests on where you live, your budget, and assorted other reasons.  For me, a real tree is simply a tradition I refuse to give up.  Picking out a tree with my family was a big deal when I was young.  There was something magical about living in sunny Los Angeles and watching dozens of pine-scented snow-dusted trees being unloaded from Canadian railcars.  Never mind we paid a little extra to have our tree “flocked” (adding a touch of spray-painted artificial snow).  It was still a real tree.

Memorex: Sound that “blows you away”.

Real vs. artificial goes way beyond Christmas trees.  When I consider one next to the other, I always think of Memorex.  In the 1970s and ’80s the Memorex Corporation produced audio cassettes, the precursor to the compact disc.  In their TV commercials Memorex included singer Ella Fitzgerald belting out a note powerful enough to shatter a wine glass.  Then they’d play a recording of Ella’s performance and the wine glass would still shatter, begging the question, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”

Real vs. artificial also recalls Milli Vanilli, the R&B duo from the late ’80’s.  Milli Vanilli made it big with the album “Girl You Know It’s True”, then won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.  But years later the world would find out Milli Vanilli never sang anything.  Instead they lip-synced their way to fame; their albums the voices of studio performers.  Milli Vanilli returned the Best New Artist Grammy shortly after that.

Let’s visit real vs. artificial a little closer to home; say, the kitchen.  As much as my wife and I seek whole, organic, locally produced foods, we can’t help including a few outliers.  I just went through our pantry and came up with a few good examples:

  1. Aunt Jemima syrup.  This pancake topper – destined for rebranding in the name of racial equality – is nothing but high fructose corn syrup, water, and a whole lot of chemicals.  The “Natural Butter Flavor” variety blatantly advertises “contains no butter”.  You’ll find all the pure maple syrup you want in Vermont but you won’t find a drop in a bottle of Aunt Jemima.
  2. Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts.  A long time ago Pop-Tarts contained real ingredients (else my mother wouldn’t have put ’em on the pantry shelf as kid snacks).  Today’s Pop-Tarts are enriched flour and a bunch of scary-sounding ingredients developed in a lab.  It takes half the height of the box to list everything that goes into a Pop-Tart.
  3. Kraft Mac & Cheese.  Make a bowl of pasta, top it with melted cheddar, and Voila! you have macaroni & cheese in two ingredients.  Kraft Mac & Cheese needs twenty-one to accomplish the same dish.  But man, don’t it taste great?
  4. Ritz Crackers.  More enriched flour plus lab ingredients.  (Maybe every food can be made from enriched flour?)  The Ritz Crackers box includes a warning, “Contains wheat, soy”.  Ha, if only that was all it contained.
  5. “Real” Bacon Bits.  My mother-in-law left this bottle of horror behind when she brought a salad for Christmas dinner.  But guess what?  It really is made of bacon (okay, and chemicals).  I must’ve been thinking of other brands, where the bits are actually “flavored textured soy flour”.  Oh ick.

Back to our real Christmas tree.  After the gifts were passed around and opened, we discovered one more, looking a little embarrassed behind the branches.  It was a brightly colored basket, the kind all dressed up with a cute wooden box and Christmas bow, overflowing with food items and protected in plastic wrap.

But here’s the rub.  We opened the basket and found a whole lot of nothing.  Generic cookies, coffee, candy, and a couple of cheap Christmas mugs, arranged carefully so as to suggest the basket contained much more.  To add insult to injury, none of the food items were name-brand (except for a handful of Lindor truffles).  The cookies and candy were made with a ton of artificial ingredients.  The coffee was so generically packaged it had me wondering if it was even coffee.  The whole basket made me think “Memorex”.

This is where I jump to a discussion about artificial intelligence, but your real brain needs a rest so that’s a topic for another day.  Meanwhile, my wife and I will keep heading out every Christmas to tree lots (or the woods) to find the perfect one.  “Artificial” may sneak into other parts of our lives now and again but at Christmas, we’ll always be keeping it real.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Calories of Contentment

The other night – too late for a grocery store run but with few options in the pantry – my wife and I split a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese for dinner. No spicing things up, no healthy side of vegetables to lessen the guilt – just a heaping bowl of the little pasta elbows with powdered cheese. MAN did that taste good. I promptly considered a Hostess Ding Dong for dessert but caught myself just in time. Whoa, boy. Who says there’s no traveling during the pandemic?  I’ve made the journey to the land of comfort foods!

A little context before we explore the calories of contentment.  After the kids moved out of the house several years ago, our diet moved decidedly to the more healthy.  We upped our fruit and vegetable count.  We focused on meals with whole foods and fewer ingredients.  We started shopping in boutique grocery stores, discovering foods and brands we never knew existed.  Dairy and starchy carbs took the back shelf to pure proteins and Mother Nature’s bounty.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this good intention, a box of Kellogg’s Pretzel Cinnamon-Sugar Pop-Tarts dropped casually into my grocery basket.  I’d heard they were pretty good and I’d never tried them before, so… why not?  Then the kids came to town for a long weekend, so we just had to load up on old family favorites like Cap’n Crunch, Good Humor Creamsicles, and Red Baron frozen pizzas.

But here’s the thing.  Our kids eat so responsibly these days, sugary cereals and snack foods no longer appeal to them.  They make flourless banana pancakes and organic food “bowls”.  They nosh on healthy proteins and Boba teas.  They spend most of their time in the kitchen instead of the drive-thru.  Those comfort foods we purchased got no love, so naturally we purchased a couple more (the Kraft Mac & Cheese and Hostess Ding Dongs).  Heck, we even embellished those choices with a countertop bowl of Brach’s caramel “Royals”, and a huge container of Peanut M&M’s in a nearby cupboard.  There’s now a junk-food roadblock in front of every attempt to eat healthy.

What is going on here?  I blame the coronavirus.  Most of our processed-food pals moved into our pantry in the last six months.  All of them were impulse buys (or “moments of weakness”, or whatever else you want to call them).  No surprise though; we’re contributing to a nationwide, if not worldwide trend during this pandemic.  The world’s biggest packaged-foods manufacturers reported sales growth of 4.3% in the first three months of the year (vs. forecasts of 3%).  Canned soup purchases rose 37%, canned meat 60%, and frozen pizza 51%.  Hot Pockets and SpaghettiOs flew off the shelves.

Is one of these YOUR comfort food?

In all seriousness, a turn to comfort foods is a sign of something more complicated below the surface of our psyches.  I wish I could credit nostalgia: the sentimentality for past happier times and places, or emotional eating: the propensity to consume comfort foods in response to positive/negative stimuli.  Instead, I think we’re dealing with declinism – the belief our society is heading towards a prolonged downturn or deterioration.  We’ve been here before America, as in the Depression of the 1930s, the spread of Communism in the 1950s, or the rise of Japan’s economic powerhouse in the 1970s.  In each instance our country soldiered on better than before, but that’s not to say the short-term endurance is any fun.  And that, boys and girls, is why comfort foods maintain a “healthy” presence in grocery stores and in your pantry.

Hilton Hotels rivaled the pandemic headlines when they revealed their Doubletree chocolate-chip cookie recipe to the world last April.  Talk about your classic comfort food.  Doubletree cookies have nestled on hotel pillows since the mid-1980s; a whopping 25,000,000 in less than forty years.  “We know this is an anxious time for everyone”, was Hilton’s excuse for sharing their secret.  I baked a batch as soon as I came across the headline and now I can’t seem to stop.  A heaping bag of Doubletrees now sits in our refrigerator more often than it does not.  I could probably recite the recipe from memory, and I dream about them in my sleep.  Hilton’s got me hooked.

I still haven’t tried those Pretzel Cinnamon-Sugar Pop-Tarts, the preservative-filled pastries responsible for this whole mess.  All are still paired neatly in their foil packets, sitting quietly on the shelf.  The box may even be getting a little dusty.  I figure my willpower remains intact if I leave the tarts alone until their expiration date.  Er, wait – now that I think about it – Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts never expire.  Dang it; that’s a little depressing.  I’d better have a Ding Dong to cheer myself up.

Some content sourced from the 4/24/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Comfort Foods Make a Comeback in the Coronavirus Age”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.