Sorry, Parents Of Picky Eaters: 250,000 Cases Of Kraft Macaroni Being Recalled

macaroni and cheeseBad news for all the parents of toddlers who are currently refusing to eat any meal that isn’t Day-Glo orange: Kraft is recalling a quarter million cases of macaroni and cheese. Better check the boxes in your pantry before you make dinner tonight, unless maybe you were planning on serving the meal with a hearty side of metal fragments anyway.

First, the nitty-gritty; here’s how you can tell if your package of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner is potentially a little more thoroughly enriched with minerals than usual:

  • It’s the original-flavor style (there are other flavors of Kraft macaroni? why, though?) and comes in a 7.25-ounce box.
  • The expiry date falls between September 18 and October 11.
  • The code “C2” appears below the expiry date.
  • There are shards of metal in it. Like, actual metal pieces.

According to the Washington Post, even if you bought a multi-pack containing several individual boxes, you still have to check every single one, because sometimes boxes manufactured at different facilities are packaged together. (Insert sad trombone noise here.) My fingers are crossed that you have at least one box to throw down onto your picky eater’s high chair tray tonight, but if you’re fresh out of edible macaroni, you can take it back to the grocery store for an exchange (or a refund, if you decide Annie’s Bunny Pasta With Yummy Cheese is a replacement less likely to fill your meal with shrapnel).

The bad news about this recall comes right on the heels on good news for another of Kraft’s products. Earlier this week, the company’s American Cheese Singles (a.k.a. ‘cheese product’, as it does not warrant the title of ‘actual cheese’) got awarded a stamp of approval called “Kids Eat Right” by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics–their first such award, in fact. It’s unclear how exactly a cheese-adjacent dairy product loaded with extra sodium warranted a healthy-eating badge before, say, actual cheese, but no doubt the company’s macaroni and cheese will soon be similarly rewarded for setting new standards when it comes to iron enrichment.

It’s nice to imagine that our food is hand-picked by happy farmers from a beautifully organically-grown macaroni and cheese tree and then lovingly packaged into its blue box by a wise old woman wearing a babushka, but realistically, food is manufactured in factories and stuff like this happens. In any case, our household is unaffected by the recall: we live in Wisconsin and I’m a dairy-product snob, so we make our macaroni and cheese with butter and actual shredded cheese (not ‘cheese food’, not ‘cheese product’, not whatever the hell Velveeta is supposed to be) … at least until my kids are old enough to start holding mealtime hostage until I break out the stuff in the blue box.

(Image: Ju-Lee / Getty)

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