An Ode to Kraft Dinner, Food of Troubled Times

In 1992, the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies sang: “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.” Whenever they played the song live, fans would throw elbow noodles across the stage like confetti, pelting the band members with cheese powder and sometimes full boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese.

This type of pandemonium was matched by Kraft’s own marketing tactics in the ’90s. Cheesasaurus Rex, Kraft’s official mascot, first graced television screens in 1991. In the ensuing years, he shot himself into space with huge cheese cannons and surfed massive cheese waves while noodles break-danced on the shore. In these commercials, sentient macaroni drive speedboats and sell out stadiums and skateboard into the sunset. It was also during this chaotic era that Kraft debuted their fun cartoon-inspired pasta shapes. Anyone from Bugs Bunny to SpongeBob might show up on your dinner plate. The company geared their advertising campaigns toward kids and screamed their slogan, “You know you love it,” into the void. The kids screamed back yes, yes we do. I was one of them.

Kraft Foods officially debuted its boxed macaroni and cheese in 1937. At the time, the US was deep in the pits of the Great Depression, and the official product slogan was “a meal for four in nine minutes for an everyday price of nineteen cents.” After rations were imposed during World War II, the nonperishable blue boxes cemented their place in our grocery carts and our culture. Two boxes of Kraft could be purchased for one rationing coupon, offering the masses a little taste of something satisfying when meat and dairy were unavailable. Eighty million boxes were sold in 1943.

Since then, Kraft Mac and Cheese (also known as Kraft Dinner, KD, Easy Mac, and Vitamin K) has remained a staple in North American homes. While the world has continued to change, Kraft’s product has remained virtually the same, somehow evading inflation at a consistent one or two dollars per box. Against all odds, the highlighter-orange cheese is and remains delicious. Unlike so many other wild instant foods that have been popularized over the years––Baby Bottle Pops, Dunkaroos, 3D Doritos––Kraft is not a phenomenon. Kraft is here to stay.

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Though my relationship with Kraft Mac and Cheese began in the ’90s, a time of economic prosperity for the United States, its role in my family history is rooted in hardship. Despite the economic boom, Clinton-era affluence did not really reach my family, who had freshly arrived in Canada as refugees of the Yugoslavian civil war. When I was born, we had three generations living under one roof: my grandparents, my uncles and my parents, and me. The adults worked minimum-wage jobs painting parking-lot stripes while I toiled at home, an unemployable baby.

Though my relationship with Kraft Mac and Cheese began in the ’90s, a time of economic prosperity, its role in my family history is rooted in hardship.

No one in my family can agree on the exact moment Kraft infiltrated our Balkan home. My mother insists she never bought it, and Baba suspects my uncle was at fault somehow. Despite this unremarkable entrance, I started asking for it––even begging for it. Traditional Balkan food takes a lot of time and care to get right. Pita (a dish of phyllo dough, spinach, and feta all baked together) must be gently layered. The phyllo is handled like thousand-year-old lace in order to avoid ripping it apart. Baklava (a dessert of phyllo dough and walnut filling) involves hand-grinding walnuts, layering phyllo once again, and then soaking it all overnight in a vat of sugar syrup. Unlike these Slavic dishes, Kraft Mac and Cheese takes nine minutes, tops. While my family ran around trying to keep up multiple jobs and dealing with trauma upon trauma, the short cooking time became all the more alluring. My mother was especially gifted in the kitchen, but the task of daily feedings usually fell to my grandmother, who was often in charge of taking care of me and keeping me full.

Baba made Kraft like nobody else. She never measured anything when she cooked, so the proportions the box recommends (four tablespoons of butter, a quarter cup of milk) were more like one fat mound of butter plus a huge glug of milk. I would sit on the counter to better see the whole production unfold. While the water boiled, she’d shuffle around the kitchen in her house slippers and fleece sweater-vest, always too cold to sit still. I would lean over the pot to watch the noodles dance for me. I never remember Baba checking the doneness of the macaroni. After all, the noodles do not need to be al dente to really sing.

As Baba dumped the water into the sink, the steam would rise up like a mushroom cloud. It was at this point that my mouth began to water. Then came the butter, milk, and cheese packet and lots of vigorous mixing with a wooden spoon. Baba believed that the noodles could not be eaten immediately––they had to sit for a while and “absorb” the cheesy sauce. When they were adequately soaked, she would sprinkle feta over the top and take the plate of macaroni out to the balcony so the night air could cool it down. Sometimes she would light a cigarette while holding the dish outside, letting tiny pieces of ash rain down over the plate like freshly cracked black pepper.

The first bite was bliss. I usually started eating so fast that I had to pause while all the mouthfuls I had barely chewed could make their way safely to my stomach. I’d wait for a moment while a knot of noodles shimmied down my throat, and then I’d start again, only slightly slowed by my poor motor skills. It would be far too easy to write Kraft off as soulless junk food, but how could I, with its inextricable place in my upbringing? My baba taught me to make it with the same care she taught me to make baklava. Guess which one I make more often.

More than twenty years later, the sound of dried pasta tubes sliding across cardboard soothes me like a rain stick. Kraft was the first meal I ever truly loved, the first one I attempted to cook on my own, and the first food I could not live without. There are four boxes tucked into my pantry as I write this.

When I left my childhood home in Canada to move to the United States, Kraft with feta cheese became more than just a comfort meal when I was missing my baba––it became a private ritual. It also became a form of self-protection. As many children of immigrants can attest, the lunchroom crowd is not exactly welcoming of foreign foods (especially not stuffed grape leaves, which, in the words of one of my classmates, looked like “a bunch of wet little turds”). Kraft was safe; Kraft was cool. There was nothing remotely turd-like about Kraft. Yet even in my attempts to assimilate, the feta has always remained vital to the dish. A secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese.

In middle school, I remember waking up to a pot of mac on the stove for my sisters and I to share, usually a sign that my mother’s three jobs had exhausted her to the point of defeat. I bought the Costco bulk boxes throughout college to help survive the brutal Chicago winters. My roommate and I would ration them out, saving Kraft for “emergencies.” More often than not, that just meant an afternoon we were too tired to cook after a particularly brutal shift at the diner-bar-and-grill that employed us even though we were underage. When I moved away for college, it took about a year for me to find a reliable feta guy, but once I located a Middle Eastern grocer that carried real feta (in brine of course), the thirty-six-minute train ride out toward Evanston was well worth it. My feta guy never let me down. His sheep’s-milk feta was so good that we would often reach into the fridge to tear off chunks, licking the residue off our bare hands. After college, I landed an assistant job at Vogue that both was a once-in-a-lifetime extravagance and paid me barely enough to live. Kraft kept me fed. Only once did I dare bring my Tupperware full of highlighter-orange noodles into the office for lunch, and, of course, on that day of all days, hoards of people came by my desk asking me for Tom Ford perfumes and Chanel lip glosses.

Like my own story, Kraft’s origin story has all the classic American dream plot points. James Lewis Kraft was born in Ontario, Canada (as was I), the second of eleven children. As a young man, Kraft set out to make a name for himself, and in 1902, he secured a job in Buffalo as secretary and treasurer of the Shefford Cheese Company. Kraft rose through the ranks and became a partner at the company, only to be unceremoniously removed by his fellow partners while on a business trip to Chicago. He used all he had, a measly sixty-five dollars, to rent a horse and wagon and establish his own business buying and selling wholesale cheese to local grocers. By 1907, the business was failing. According to company lore, when Kraft found religion and decided to “make God a partner” in this venture, his cheese business suddenly began to improve and eventually became an empire.

His story is the kind that inspired my family to move to North America in hopes of a better life. My grandparents left their war-riddled home country in search of more than just peace. They wanted to secure a future for subsequent generations, they wanted economic opportunity and stability, they wanted some semblance of comfort. James Lewis Kraft’s story reads almost like mythology now. Building an empire rarely happens in one generation, especially when that generation has to leave their home country to find a new life. The more common story is that immigrants cross the ocean to find themselves buried in debt and suffering from chronic stress, chronic illness, and chronic worry. Pursuing the American dream comes with a steep price, one that is even higher for immigrants of color. I am not the heiress of a processed-cheese empire. I have no property or trust fund to fall back on. As for my inheritance, I’m proud to say I’ve inherited my mother’s work ethic and my grandfather’s love of stories. When my elders die, they will leave me nothing but their memories.

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As the economic markets shifted, so did Kraft. Mac and cheese remained a pantry staple throughout the convenience-obsessed ’50s and found true experimentation in the ’60s, debuting recipes for Kraft “seafood medley” (Kraft Mac and Cheese spread out over a paella pan with fried fish sticks on top) and “Kraft Cake” (Kraft pressed into a bundt cake pan, popped out, and littered with parsley). But despite these variations, Kraft has always stayed in uncanny step with the financial reality of the times. Take the financially brutal ’70s, when Kraft’s campaigns started to spotlight frugality. Their landmark advertising campaign was “Kraft Dinners Make Ends Meet.” The advertisements read, “Tonight’s dinner doesn’t have to look like today’s economy,” ending with the vaguely tragic “Just one of the ways Kraft Dinners can help you eat well in spite of it all.” Economists might as well use the Kraft Mac and Cheese index to track recessions.

Kraft has seen the American people through economic hardship, world wars, and social movements. It is, without a doubt, the food of troubled times. The fact that any one of us can go to a grocery store and buy one of these boxes for about a dollar during a global pandemic, a time of unprecedented inflation in the midst of a looming recession, is astonishing.

Economists might as well use the Kraft Mac and Cheese index to track recessions. 

Kraft is not technically a Slavic food. But for me, Kraft is soaked with memories of my origin story. When I take a bite of Kraft, I feel connected to my upbringing, the war, my mother, my first-grade ESL class. Just because I can buy it from Costco, does that make it any less meaningful? Admittedly, it’s not made by following complicated baking instructions read off tattered papyrus paper, but it still carries the stories of my past.

I may not know James Kraft, but I share his hometown and his dogged determination. I feel it in every milk-soaked noodle. I see it in my grandmother’s hands. I see it in my mother’s eyes when my sisters and I visit home and ask if we can make some Kraft and relive our childhood. “Are you fucking serious?” she asks, a smile tucked behind her words. At that point my youngest sister is probably already holding two or three boxes, I am boiling water, and my middle sister is rifling through the fridge for the good feta with the little cows on the tin. My mom passes me a wooden spoon and shakes her head. We are serious, or at least, I am serious. This is serious.

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