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First Lady Michelle Obama says she dropped boxed macaroni and cheese from her family’s diet after her daughter couldn’t turn a block of cheese into cheese powder.
The idea to stop offering the cheap and easy meal came from the family’s former personal chef, Sam Kass, who opposed the processed food for its unhealthfulness. Kass once challenged Malia to take a block of cheese and turn it into a pile of powder that has the same consistency of the processed stuff that comes in the box.
Ever since launching her Let’s Move! campaign, Michelle has worked hard to encourage healthier eating among kids and their families. She’s strived to set a good example by planting a White House garden and having her chef use produce from it in his dishes. She’s widely advertised that she no longer feeds her family processed foods and advocates for home-cooked meals with the freshest ingredients.
“It’s doable – people just need the training and the education.
“What we do know is that the food you cook is healthier, and it can be more affordable, but it takes some skills,” Michelle told Cooking Light.
Instead of making box mac and cheese, the First Lady suggest cooking up some tomatoes and basil, adding some seasoning, and then boiling pasta. you have a delicious meal.
“It’s quick,” she says. “It’s fast. It becomes faster the more you do it.”
Is encouraging Americans to stop feeding their kids boxed mac and cheese realistic?
Ask any kid in America what she wants her mom or dad to cook for dinner, and I can guarantee you that you’ll hear “mac and cheese” at least 50 percent of the time.
My kids always deliver this response when I give them the chance to decide what’s for dinner. They never request my favorite kale salad or that French-inspired vegetable pistou soup recipe given to me by my friend Spring. But I can’t fairly complain because as a kid I was always lobbying for my mother to whip up Kraft mac and cheese.
Do I feed my kids loads of boxed mac and cheese? Definitely not every night, but about once a week, I pull out a few boxes of Annie’s mac and cheese and cook them up because my husband and I both work full-time and are raising three children. It’s not humanly possible to put meals made from scratch on the table every night and we certainly can’t afford to hire a personal family chef.
My rule is that the mac and cheese must include vegetables and so I’m often adding frozen peas or corn. And my favorite preparation: Bacon and toasted kale.
Agencies/Canadajournal
How about if the author of this article stopped working full time and stayed home to make home cooked meals? Her husband is working and the expenses would probably decrease if one of them stayed home with the kids.
Otherwise, the complaint, “my husband and I work full time and are raising three kids and it’s not humanly possible to put meals made from scratch on the table every night.” Well, yes it is humanly possible, you just have to figure out your priorities first.
This is ABSOLUTELY not always possible. Before you judge, be careful. They may have unpublished (how dare they keep that private) medical expenses or they are supporting aging relatives, etc. It’s very nice to sit at home on your computer and decide that the rest of the world should be like you. However, that is not always the case.
Kids love boxed Mac & Cheese. Don’t know why. Don’t care. Just cook the powdered cheese, milk and butter into a sauce and add actual cheese. You can even let the older children help.
Well, it may be better to take out stuff like mac and cheese, but if our dear First Lady had to cook every meal herself, she might not be so quick to take it off the menu. Give me a break…..She is having her chef use produce from her garden, and I’m sure it’s the gardner that takes care of the most of that or she wouldn’t even have fresh produce for the chef to use. I on the otherhand do not have a chef, nor a gardner, nor hundreds of thousands of dollars at my disposal. My family will continue to eat boxed mac and cheese. 🙁
And this is national news. WOW, slow news day Huh? If she was so health conscious, and knew her stuff, she would not have made this part of the family meal.
Boxed macaroni and cheese is such a popular food for kids that a lot of restaurants are now serving it on the kids menu. I remember when my grandson was little and they served real mac & cheese at restaurants he didn’t like it but now those same restaurants are serving Kraft. So while it may not be the healthiest food, it is definitely the one that makes the kiddies happy!
That nasty b*tch sure has her nerve! Boxed macaroni and cheese kept people from starvation during the Great Depression. This country owes a debt of gratitude to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
Too bad the children of the President of The United States of America were not educated by their special chef on food preservation techniques that necessarily include, evil of evil, dehydrated food.
A 25 dollar food dehydrator might have helped making dehydrated cheese. Anyone ever heard of parmesan cheese? You know that white dehydrated cheese that is routinely sprinkled on pizza?
Did the chef ban parmesan too, or is that not ‘boxed’?
Thank you so much Mrs Obama for boldly speaking up about the long-ignored, much glossed-over, politically inconvenient and perpetually justified matter of what is passed off and very cleverly marketed to our families and kids as “food”, in our ever profit and greed-driven microwave world.
It might be “cheap” and “convenient” (in the short term!) as the companies who now make billions of dollars marketing them to us have convinced us – but in the long term, it costs us dearly.
Many of our children (and even sadly, their parents), have absolutely no idea what they’re consuming, or for that matter, what is in their food, and couldn’t even identify most common vegetables and fruit as most have only subsisted on processed and packaged “foods” all of their lives.
The truth is that contrary to what passes as “conventional” wisdom in our profit-first, business-driven heavily modulated environment, there are indeed fast, cheap, healthy and easy to make alternatives. Healthy meals that utilize fresh, natural and identifiable ingredients that so many of us busy and on a tight budget parents can easily offer our families.
It is time we stop making excuses, stop being lazy, stop looking for cop-outs and start re-thinking what we are feeding our children, and what they and us adults are consuming, getting used to and getting addicted to. There’s no excuse to keep letting profit-driven businesses continue to cut corners and continue to market and sell us unhealthy, unnatural “foods”.
The Great Depression is long over, and there is no justification or excuse to keep serving war-time fabrications – manufactured as a last resort in a time of strife – as every day food in this the 21st century – and in the supposedly most powerful, wealthiest and most advanced country in the world.
And thank you again Mrs Obama for speaking up when so many will not.
Tho I have set myself up for negative comments, I HAVE to share this story…
My daughter-in-law tried to “replicate” my son’s mac and cheese with many recipes, without any success…sadly his Mom, myself, worked crazy hours as an Intensive care nurse, trained in dialysis. When she, my dtr.-in-law, finally asked me over the phone one day for my recipe for mac and cheese, I could feel my cheeks becoming flaming red, but did admit to her (to save her some time and heartache) that I had used Kraft mac and cheese in a box, most times adding a bit more “real” cheese as well as a bag of mixed veggies to make it a meal! We both had a great belly-laugh with that one!!!! Two kids later for her/them , etc.,etc., her go-to “I need to get something on the table” is a “revved up” version of this, but as long as it’s not a daily occurance, I don’t “sweat it”, after all, I raised a couple of great “young” men using what we could afford, and “churching-it-up”…all of this related to what one can afford, as well as arriving home after a grueling shift, and to be honest, all I could do at the time to have a meal on the table in short order was to “cheat”!!!!!