Sasha Chapman pens a love letter to mass-produced macaroni and cheese, known to Canadians as "Kraft Dinner":
In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised "dinner in seven minutes — no baking required," we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country. This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: "If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more." In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.
True, Canada is just one outpost in Kraft’s globalized food system.
The company’s iconic brands are on the rise in emerging markets, which is to say in the ancient cultures beyond the borders of North America, Europe, and Australia. In China, another Kraft product, the Oreo, has been re-engineered for the Asian market, with such success that it is now the country’s number one cookie.
But this is history repeating itself: our own food system was colonized long ago by Kraft, a company that has always striven to give us (or at least our consumer, magpie selves) what we want: cheaper food that is faster to prepare. We have been only too happy to drink the Kool-Aid, another Kraft brand.
The Dish 