Cheese, or paperboard? 
This cheese powder appears to be serious business!
I just bought a pound of this. I’ll be back with a review on Monday.
You want confusing, have you ever heard of the candy bar called “Chicken Dinner”?
In all fairness, we love poutine across Canada, not just in Quebec. 
But that’s ‘Cheez’, not cheese. Probably a vague imitation at best.
[QUOTE=MrAtZoz]
the phrase is so blandly generic and non-descriptive that one wonders how they came up with it.
[/QUOTE]
And people are wondering why the phrase is used is Canada…
Because mac & cheese is not dinner. If someone invited me for dinner and gave me mac & cheese, I’d flip the table over and demand satisfaction. Or just not eat it (because I hate it). One of those.
But seriously, it’s not dinner unless you’re a small child. For everyone else it’s a snack or side dish or something.
We call them “chocolate bars” in Canada.
What gets me is the people who (and four or five people did do this, by the way), when I lived in Canada for awhile, insisted on calling it that.
As in:
Me: Oh, Mac and cheese tonight?
Them: No…it’s Kraft Dinner.
Me: … It’s basically macaroni and cheese, though.
Them: The name of it is Kraft Dinner.
Me: Also known as…mac and cheese…
Them: Wrong, that’s not what this is called…this is called Kraft Dinner. See the box?
No, really. I had conversations similar to this at least five times in my year of living in Canada, with five different people.
“Hey! I know. How about we have some mac and cheese tonight? :)”
“You mean Kraft Dinner?”
ARRGGHHHHHH
Strangely enough, when BEST closed in Minnetonka, MN, Best Buy moved in to that building (They had been in a different building nearby). Seemed quite appropriate.
Maybe they want to distinguish between the abomination in a blue box and actual, baked, delicious mac 'n cheese.
That is exactly why. “Macaroni and cheese” is actual baked macaroni with cheese. “Kraft Dinner” is mac and cheese from a blue box and takes 9 minutes to make. That is why people distinguish between them.
Kraft Dinner. Yes. I’d never heard this term for what I know as macaroni and cheese until I married a Canadian. And (like Idle Thoughts describes above), my wife insists that the correct term for the dish is Kraft Dinner. Macaroni and cheese (or any variant thereof) is just wrong.
Other US vs. Canada (or at least the part of Canada my wife is from) food-related peculiarities I’ve noticed:
Vienna sausages (Maple Leaf brand) are edible, enjoyable food. They’re not. They’re tasteless sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor.
Miracle Whip is better than mayonnaise. Again, wrong.
Baloney is not for sandwiches. It’s meant to be sliced thick and fried. OK, this actually isn’t bad.
Fish and brewis is the food of the gods. It’s OK, I guess, but nothing to get excited about.
You can eat seals. Have you ever tasted seal meat? Enough said.
You can eat moose. Not bad, really.
You’re absolutely right. This is how I remember macaroni and cheese from my childhood. My mother made it in the oven. It was baked. The cheese was real (well, it was Velveeta), not a powder.
Actually, a closer inspection of the (US) box shows ‘Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner’. I’m guessing ‘cheese dinner’ is similar to the phrase ‘cheese product,’ which allows some leeway for cheese-flavord substances.
One of my cats goes *mental *when he hears me cut open the package and then he smells the salty cheese powder.