As a kid I loved boxed mac & cheese. Kraft was my favorite brand but my parents, who were often frugal because my Dad worked as a high school teacher for most of my young life, would usually buy Aldi brand boxed mac & cheese. For that reason Kraft felt like a special occasion.

Nostalgia is a funny thing when it comes to food. When I finally convinced my mom one Thanksgiving to make homemade mashed potatoes instead of instant, I was surprised to learn that my Dad liked them less than the instant my mom would normally make. Years later I learned this was because his Mom fed him TV dinners growing up, and instant mashed potatoes tasted like mashed potatoes from TV dinners.

I have had some delicious homemade mac & cheese in the past few years, but I were truly honest, they was never as good as the memory I have of Kraft mac & cheese. I have been diligent about cooking for myself the past few months so recently I decided I had earned a nostalgic Kraft mac & cheese dinner, something I haven’t tried for over a decade.

And so I grabbed a box of Kraft and some milk with my weekly grocery trip and made a pot. After cooking and draining the noodles and mixing milk, butter, and the mysterious yellow powder in the pot that once held the noodles, I added the steaming noodles into the warm gooey cheese sauce and stirred until it sounded like that one vine. I poured myself a bowl and staring back at me was a bowl of yellow noodles, so artificially yellow I would have been frightened had I not been raised on it. And then I excitedly took a bite.

Enter crushing disappointment. It was bland! Where was the cheesy flavor? It tasted like butter noodles! I added some nutritional yeast, salt, and Tony’s to the bowl and the result was pretty good, but nothing at all like my memory.

Perhaps my memory of Kraft was just a cognitive distortion, a delicacy barrel-aged in nostalgia for over a decade. Or perhaps they had changed the recipe. It is well-known that Kraft changed its mac & cheese recipe without telling customers in 2016, and I can find plenty of anecdotal evidence from various social media posts by users wondering if Kraft mac & cheese had gotten worse. But I cannot find any truly concrete evidence that quality of the brand has degraded.

My roommates swear by Annie’s brand mac & cheese instead, specifically the white cheddar variety. I tried it last night and they are right, Annie’s white cheddar is delicious. But nostalgia is a funny thing and Annie’s still doesn’t hit quite like I remember Kraft hitting from my childhood.

Regardless of whether my memory of Kraft is a distortion, I have decided to put boxed mac & cheese behind me. I like cooking and have made mostly homemade food for the past few months, and I feel much better than I did just a year ago where my diet consisted mostly of takeout. And best of all, Costco hot dogs still taste exactly as good as I remember them so I can just hold on to that instead.