I’ll admit I’m a bit older, but to me Mac & Cheese always ranked up there with Hamburger Helper. It was something cheap and easy that young moms could make for their kids. Once you got old enough to know better, it wasn’t something you really sought out.
How did it become something people rave about?
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Kraft Mac is cheap but it’s not all that way. Have you ever eaten baked macaroni and cheese?
It’s been around for hundreds of years but with Parmesan cheese instead of Cheddar.
It tastes good to some people, or they are nostalgic for the taste of something they enjoyed while young. (I guess that’s what comfort food is.)
Macaroni and cheese predates the boxed, convenience food variety by at least a century, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of it. (Presidents and White House dinners often seem to be how decadent foods would cross the Atlantic.) I suspect, however, that it becoming a convenience food meant that tons of kids were exposed to it, and then, as adults, they sought it out again. But, rather than stick with the comfort food, they could also look into the more homemade varieties.
Combine that with the foodie craze, and you have a recipe for what you describe: adults looking for fancier versions of their childhood staples and raving about the best ones.
It seems like I heard somewhere that the powdered Kraft variety came about after someone invented dried cheese in the early 20th century. The original intent was for it to be a shelf stable food that could be included in military rations (the dried cheese that is, not mac and cheese). But the Army didn’t want it or the soldiers hated it or something like that, so the inventor started experimenting with other uses for the stuff, and hit on the idea of making macaroni and cheese with it. And thus boxed, powdered mac and cheese was born.
Yep, nostalgia. I bet it really got going as a Boomer thing. Boomers grew up eating mac & cheese. Then they came of age, some opened restaurants, and started making artisanal mac & cheese that was reminiscent of what they grew up with, but much better.
I personally hated the Kraft stuff when I was a kid, but now I sometimes make a baked version of mac & cheese that’s a knock-off of a local restaurant chain (the Clarkston Union Group) and it’s always a big hit with friends and family. I vary it, but I use at least 3 different kinds of cheese.
Not all of us grew up eating that fluorescent orange plastic stuff. My mom made a roux from butter and flour and milk, added shredded cheddar and let it melt, salted and peppered it, then poured it over pasta shells and baked it in the oven until the edges were crisp and the cheese sauce was browned in spots along the top. You’d dip it out and little puddles of cheese oil would drizzle into the spoon.
Today me and my partner with whom I cook have at least half a dozen different favorite mac & cheese recipes. It is a food every bit as noble and wonderful as the different forms of pasta with red sauce or the different types of cheese fondue. All of which assumes that you have an appreciation of pasta and/or cheese, of course.
Yeah, macaroni and cheese famously can be traced back to the 18th century as a popular dish. It has a long history of being made fancy, in fact it seems it started out as a fancy dish and then got “democratized” with cheaper versions over the ensuing centuries. But my grandmother made a good baked macaroni and cheese that she had been making since at least the 1920s when I was a kid, Kraft didn’t invent it, and the only reason people make better than Kraft versions isn’t as some hipster thing. A lot of Americans may have grown up only knowing the orange stuff, but that shouldn’t obscure that there’s a tradition of good quality mac n cheese going back hundreds of years.
And some of us still don’t eat it. Gah that stuff is horrible. 
I have no fond memories of eating it.
In my circles, Mac N Cheese was popular with the stoners. I guess it was cheap and easy to make in a dorm room. (My circle is “tweener-boomers”, born 1961-1965)
If I were going to eat Mac & Cheese from a box, I would pick up a box of Annie’s Shells. Nobody should be subjected to Kraft.
^ My wife swears by Annie’s products - it has the Rabbit of Approval, you know.
In my growing-up house (with many, many children and grandchildren) we were not fond of the dried cheese Kraft but the Deluxe with the foil packet cheese “sauce”-- or the even bigger one with the can of cheese sauce-- was much loved. Mi Abuelita didn’t make from scratch but I LOVE Alton Brown’s version of stovetop mac. My husband makes a killer baked mac 'n cheese. Both of us like to experiment with what cheeses we put in.
Please! Look more closely at the label: it’s the “Bunny of Approval”!
And yes, I agree with others that mac and cheese is a perfectly respectable pasta dish that has become maligned because of travesties like the Kraft boxed junk. One of the stores here sells “grown-up mac and cheese” with truffle, but I don’t particularly like it. I do like basic freshly made mac and cheese from another place, to which I add pieces of smoked garlic sausage and then nuke for about three minutes, uncovererd. It’s a great fast comfort food.
Until recently it was the “Rabbit of Approval”, though. According to Wikipedia they only changed it to “Bunny of Approval” last year:
Their mascot is a rabbit named Bernie, who appears in the seal of approval called the “Rabbit of Approval” and another slogan called “Bunny of Approval” in 2020.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance! But I must say that no rabbit has any business being named “Bernie”. Bernie was the name of my 120-pound Bernese Mountain Dog. It’s blasphemous to assign that name – and the right to pass judgment on mac and cheese – to some hole-dwelling long-eared lagomorph whose main qualification is to be the principal ingredient for rabbit stew.
How about the store brand or off-brand versions of Kraft?
Thanks for bailing me out on this WildaBeast. I was wondering why the rabbit on the box in AHunter3’s post looked different and why it said Bunny of Approval. I’d been out mowing grass all afternoon and was thinking maybe the sun got to me. I owe you a beer!
Man, the things we get into here on The Dope! 
But then it would be a version of Kraft. Probably taste like it and stuff.
I keep forgetting:
Longhorn Steakhouse has killer M&C; pieces of ham, some kinda crusty topping, 3 or 4 kinds of cheese - it’s just the best.
There’s a Welsh Rabbit joke in there somewhere, but damned if I’m going down that hole after it. 