Mac&cheese is quick. Even from raw ingredients.
Maybe this is cultural, but growing up in Europe with a single-mom who worked 2 jobs ... we had homecooked meals only. Store-bought pre-packaged stuff was too expensive and unhealthy.
Takes about 20min to cook a nice weekday meal based on whatever's in the fridge. You pack the fridge on weekends.
I think there’s a clear pattern of food cultures being hollowed out over time. It’s great if your parents know how to cook well and you can learn from them, but eventually that chain breaks when a child would rather buy their food than learn to cook it. Making things from scratch is hard and time-consuming if you don’t know how to cook. At that point store-bought meals are sometimes the best remaining option.
The United States gets a lot of flack for being the first country to encounter a lot of issues because we were the first to widely industrialize food, but this will happen everywhere.
Many people don't realize how easy cooking staples can be and are intimidated, or lack the interest to figure it out. That likely correlates strongly to the lifestyle they were raised in. Also, most folks' psyches seem tightly coupled to the foods they were exposed to at a young age. If someone was raised eating Kraft, that's naturally what they'll think of as mac and cheese, and they may never revisit that association as an adult.
Scratch / improvised cooking is a skill that takes practice to be good at. Personally, I enjoy it as a hobby. My mom cooked a lot, but made very bland food. I regularly pick out a random food I enjoyed from childhood, then figure out how to make it authentically. Last month I figured out perogies (I cheated on the mashed potatoes). Last week I made a delicious seared lamb with fennel and tomatoes (I've been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares lately). Over the last two years I've optimized my sourdough technique to the point that it's boring (although I still wish I could get a more sour flavor!) I learned how to make proper wood fired pizza in Italy before COVID, and I'm still enjoying optimizing that at home, and starting to experiment with sicilian style.
It takes half that to prepare it from a box. And most of that time is waiting (either for the water to boil or for the pasta to cook).
And further, you know what you're getting with the blue box. Less risk of messing up, and less painful if you do somehow catastrophically mess up.
aside from that, I think there must be some regional price differences here. a box of annie's mac and cheese is like $1.50, which goes down if you buy in bulk. if you're fancy you can add a pad of butter and/or some whole milk, but otherwise that's $1.50 to feed two people. an 8oz block of cheddar cheese is already $2 at target, and you still have to buy the pasta, milk etc.
mac and cheese is a surprisingly expensive food to cook at home though. I could definitely make a rice and beans for less money.
Well there's your problem! A portion of cheese is 1oz :D
That's 880 calories for $2. Pretty good imo
1. Cheap; yeah, pasta is cheap either way, but real cheese (at least the sort that'd actually be decent in mac and cheese) often ain't
2. Non-perishable; this means we could buy in bulk and not have to worry so much about shelf life, further amplifying Aspect #1
3. Quick; if you just came home from a long day at work, you're not likely to have the energy to prepare some elaborate home-cooked meal every night, so the trusty 'ol blue box it is
4. Easy; one of the first things I learned how to cook when I was growing up was packaged mac and cheese (be it Kraft or some generic brand) - all the ingredients except for water (and, optionally, milk/butter) are right there in the box
These four aspects are applicable for a lot of prepackaged food here in the US. Even if you do add other ingredients (milk/butter to Kraft Dinner, ground beef to Hamburger Helper, etc.), having most of it already ready to go - and cheaply at that - is a godsend for any working class family. And sure, this didn't mean we always ate the prepackaged stuff (my stepmom and stepdad both happened to enjoy cooking from scratch on various occasions, and sometimes it is indeed cheaper to go scratch-made than prepackaged), but it was indeed a staple.