I recently saw someone on my Twitter feed talk about film appreciation (I forget who, and Twitter maybe doesn’t exist by the time this publishes). They said that as a kid you like trash movies, and as you grow up you get into art house movies and film school stuff, and then after you learn about what makes a movie impressive and special, you go back to watching the junk again, appreciating it even more. As someone who has watched the “Rowdy” Roddy Piper film Hell Comes to Frogtown twice in the last year, I’d agree it is a pretty accurate assessment.

It’s not just for movies though, I’ve gone through this low/high brow parabola with everything from music, what kind of cars I think look cool, comedy, and especially food.

This is probably not a revelation considering we live in the age of celebrity chefs. There’s a couple things every tattoo sleeved chef that swears on their TV show loves. One is knowing an old person that works at the market. They all do this, and it lends them some street cred and shows us they get hookups the average shopper doesn’t. The other thing is celebrating trashy food like it’s some kind of populist political statement. Personally, I look at both of these things as cynical exercises for the TV cameras, but I also can’t argue: it’s cool to know an old person at a market, and McDonald’s is good.

So “bad” food is good, we know this now thanks to TV chefs. They’re pros and they eat sloppy egg sandwiches and truck tacos. And while it certainly applies to most types of food, today we apply it to macaroni and cheese. The X axis represents one’s level of food experience in time, and the Y axis goes from low to high brow. It’s an easy to follow chart and also it looks like a noodle.

And while this is a simple chart to understand, I think it needs to be common knowledge. The reason I’m even writing this is that about a month ago, I was out at a bar watching an episode of my favorite TV show, Monday Night Football, and I ordered macaroni and cheese, and let me tell you this: it was the shittiest mac and cheese I have had in years.

Why was it shitty? Because whoever set the menu at this bar was midway through the time axis, but then didn’t have any of the expertise to make a good fancy cheese and noodle dish. It was made with penne, which I’m assuming they felt was a more adult take on your classic elbow macaroni. I’m not sure what kind of cheese they used, but it was dry, oily, clumpy, salty, and mostly tasteless. Probably a decent cheese if you were to put it on a sandwich or rolled up with a little gabagool, but absolute tasteless paste melted over pasta. 

It doesn’t have to be like this and with Thanksgiving approaching, I just want to get this message out there: Use Velveeta.

I won’t belabor the point, and I’ll let you be creative on your own terms with how that works, but just keep it simple and use Velveeta. The beauty of this cheese product is that it melts perfectly so you can use it as a canvas for whatever other cheeses you may want. Sharpen the flavor with a gouda, cheddar, or gorgonzola. And go nuts and add whatever else you’re into, bacon, shrimp, burnt ends, caramelized onions, fried shallots. Experiment, watch YouTube videos, adjust your seasoning blend, make test batches for your friends, have a macaroni and cheese party. But just know this, it’s going to be hard to top the melt quality, ease of use, and versatility of just chunking up a log of ‘veet and letting it rip. This Thanksgiving you don’t need to be a hero, you just need to do the right thing.

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