Much to the chagrin of legions of frighteningly faddish foodies (at this very moment, drawing little 100-mile radius circles on maps and plotting Byzantine localer-than-thou provisioning strategies), the good ole USA has no culinary tradition stronger than that invented by Kraft, ConAgra and General Mills. The quaint regional cuisines — gumbo here, ribs there, chicharrones over there — so picturesquely chronicled by Gourmet magazine and the New York Times food section are, at this point, largely myth. For almost half a century, the American public has been happily chowing down out of boxes, cans, pouches and bags. And while we may savor every last bite of our Stouffer’s Turkey Dinner or Annie’s mac ‘n’ cheese, cold cereal is our lodestar, our old faithful, our most quintessential food.

To be sure, there are breakfast renegades. The unseemly few who start the day with a seven-minute downward-facing tree, a 5-mile uphill sprint and a slow-simmered vegan meal involving all four (now five?) major food groups. Or, in a seedy parallel universe, those, such as militant members of Pro-Ana Nation and drug-befuddled aging rock stars, who have opted out of the eating thing entirely. But for 31 percent of breakfast eaters — as calculated by a 2005 ABC poll — the morning ritual is to stumble blearily into the kitchen, fumble around in the cupboard, and get shaking with the flakes, loops or puffs. Which explains why ready-to-eat cereal, or RTEC as it is charmingly called in the trade, is the No. 3 supermarket top-seller, ringing up about $9 billion in annual sales, according to the 2002 Economic Census.

The cereal story starts with your great-great-great grandparents’ clogged plumbing. Legend has it that upon rising they liked to gorge on such treats as fresh ham, rashers of bacon, smoked and salted fish, sides of beef, bread and butter, and coffee served by the pint. This led naturally to gastric distress, then known as dyspepsia, and its kissing cousin, constipation, a time-honored obsession of the long of tooth. (Who among us hasn’t been accosted by a spritely senior relative with a no-detail-spared potty report?) Rescue appeared with the founders of Kellogg’s, Quaker Oats and General Mills, who, by subjecting to newfangled industrial processes the grains (oats, wheat and barley) that had for millennia been cooked into nourishing paps and porridges, ushered in the age of Colon Blow.

Oh the fun they had! The very names of the machinery they invented bristle with little-boy id: grinders, crushers, breakers, pulverizers, choppers and, my personal favorite, extruders. Test-drive this cuddly recipe, home bakers: Take oat flour, corn starch, sugar, salt, vitamin E, trisodium phosphate (also used to prep wood for painting), calcium carbonate and that old food-industry standby “Natural Flavors” (not!). Mix with water to form a slurry (a sticky paste) and ram into a narrow chamber with a long, twisted screw, until it shoots out an O-shaped orifice at the other end. Slice into toroids (that’s doughnut shapes to you), load into puffer and explode under 200 psi. Voilà! Cheerios!

Of course, there are a few things lost when you subject vegetable matter to the kind of brutality usually reserved for unlawful combatants. Niceties like vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. And did I mention flavor? After all that processing, what you end up with is reconstituted plant cellulose, which explains why the taste of breakfast cereal so resembles that of another product made with reconstituted plant cellulose: cardboard. In fact, since manufacturing strips grains of 15 percent to 100 percent of most nutrients (source: the Nutrition Handbook for Food Processors), if it weren’t for the chemicals used in bleaching, you might as well tear up a couple of 8 1/2-by-11-inch sheets, add milk and slurp that down for your first meal of the day.

To compensate for all the gone-missing elements of your “whole grains,” cereal manufacturers simply add them back in at the end. (And you thought oats just happen to have 25 percent of every vitamin listed on the FDA’s percent daily value label?) As at the gas pump, there are three levels of vitamin and mineral recovery. Enrichment replaces the nutrients lost in processing. Fortification adds more than were there in the first place. And then there’s hypervitaminosis, on the theory that more is always better, even if it causes vomiting, fatigue and hair loss. In fact, breakfast cereal was one of the very first “phoods” — an edible product that claims a medical benefit — and it still dominates the category, comprising 30 percent of all nutraceuticals sold, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

Which still doesn’t address palatability, an issue that has plagued cereal entrepreneurs since Grandpa Kellogg first peddled Granula, rock-hard bran loaves that were shattered with a hammer and softened overnight in milk. For that we turn to our old friends, sugar and salt, and a new one, “inclusions,” the industry term for all that extra junk like raisins, marshmallows and honey-coated granola clusters.

Railing against sugar is like ragging on Santa Claus. How mean-spirited can you get? But if you fritter away half the USDA’s recommended daily allotment of 8 teaspoons on Barbara’s Bakery Shredded Oats, you can’t use it where it counts: on ice cream! Cookies! Cake! Chocolate! And salt — well, a serving of Cheerios has 10 milligrams more sodium than a serving of Doritos. That toddler snarfing mini O’s? A hypertension case waiting to happen. As for inclusions, they are gustatory three-card monte. Whether virtuous nuts or merry blue marshmallows, their job is to keep your mind off the flavorless flakes.

Which brings us to the question, “Is cereal even a good choice for breakfast?” The American Dietetic Association certainly seems to think so. On its Web site, it trumpets two 2005 studies published in its peer-reviewed journal that found cereal-eating teenage girls and breakfast-eating adults were more likely to be at a healthy weight — perfectly positioning the cereal industry as the antidote to the health issue du jour, obesity. But wait a sec! Who funded those studies? General Mills and Kellogg’s. Yep, since 1993 when the federal government lifted a 65-year-old ban on making health claims in food advertising, a whole new niche industry has arisen in food-company-sponsored research.

So if cereal isn’t the elixir it’s cracked up to be, why can’t you riffle the lady mags at the supermarket without being admonished to start the day with a bowl? News flash: We — the American people in the year 2007 — are not highly respected by nutritionists. In their view, they are talking us down from a bag brimming with Egg McMuffins and hash browns or a jumbo Snickers bar and a 16-ounce Coke. Their advice is tempered by a venti dose of “lesser of two evils.”

In the event that you’d like to be treated as if you weren’t nutritionally challenged, here’s what most dietitians concur is an optimal first meal, one designed to encourage six-piston brain function and provide maximal energy: Breakfast should contain about one-fifth to one-quarter of the day’s calories (how many depends on your size and activity level), include plenty of protein (at least 5 grams), be high in fiber (at least 5 grams) and micronutrients, have some fat and have as little sugar (less than 3 grams) and salt (less than 140 milligrams) as possible. Looks like that rules out most of the products in Aisle 4, shoppers!

It’s time to overthrow the breakfast cereal regime. For more than a century, we’ve suffered under its hegemony, shoveling down sugar-drenched buds, clusters and shreds, with little inherent nutritional value. So why not start the day however you damn please? Pop a One-A-Day, mix yourself a glass of Metamucil and have a Krispy Kreme — at 9 grams of sugar, you’ll be ingesting less than half the amount in a bowl of Post Raisin Bran. If you prefer to get your nutrients the old-fashioned way, i.e., by eating actual food, there’s a world of possibility out there. You can even up the ante by shooting for the high-protein, high-fiber meal recommended by most dietitians. On the run? Grab a handful of dried fruit, seeds and nuts; a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread or a slice of pizza. Got time to do a little thermal processing? There’s that glory of packaging and sustenance, the egg. Or murder yourself a mammal and fry up some spuds. Go on. Enjoy yourself. You’re free now.

Not the Annie’s that is a leader of the natural foods movement, a supporter of environmental causes and a parent’s painless answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?” The Annie’s that partners with the PBS program “Arthur” to promote literacy and reading and distributes free hippie-dippy bumper stickers that say “Be Green” and “Stand for Peace”? The Annie’s whose founder lives on a 100-acre organic farm with her two daughters, her farmer husband and a bunch of bunnies, for God’s sake?

Yes, that Annie’s.

Annie’s Homegrown Macaroni & Cheese has pretty much achieved world domination — at least if your world is populated by the chronologically challenged. Refueling Gabriel, Rebekka, Isaac and Yazmin after a grueling toddler networking session? The well-stocked mom breaks out the Annie’s. Three-course dinner with (mucho) wine for the grown-ups? A batch of Annie’s keeps the little dears quiet. Rustling up some grub after a round of African drumming and lacrosse practices? Boil water. Grab Annie’s. But while there’s nothing wrong with food that appeals to kids and is easy to prepare, do we parents really have the right to feel so damn smug every time we open the little purple box?

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

For starters, just who are Annie Withey and the company behind her, Annie’s Homegrown? When she posed for the (now-defunct) magazine Organic Style, she looked nice enough in her jeans, T-shirt and thick braid with a neo-feminist gray forelock. But it may interest you to know that she is the bona fide evil marketing genius, inventor and chief branding officer of not one, but two, packaged-food superstars: our beloved Annie’s Homegrown and Smartfood popcorn, that breakaway snack hit of the 1980s.

The Smartfood creation myth revolves around a newlywed brandishing a spoon, a little slip of a thing who has a eureka! moment at the kitchen stove and invents her very own white cheddar cheese powder. In less capable hands, that probably would have been the beginning and end of the story. But in addition to her ingenuity with edibles, Annie has marketing mojo — in spades. The Smartfood bag — a sleek black number sporting that ubiquitous Yuppie superlative “premium” — channeled Reagan-era zeitgeist, yet stood out from the crowd. A handful of early adopters moved so many packets of the cheesy tidbits that stores couldn’t keep them in stock. Short story short: In 1989, six years after its founding, Smartfood was sold to Frito-Lay for $15 million.

Annie Withey’s share of the loot is estimated to have been about $1 million. Quite enough to retire early to a Vermont subsistence farm or start an eco-tourism camp in Costa Rica or just live modestly in Ithaca, N.Y., for a decade or two, if you go in for that kind of thing, which Annie obviously didn’t. Instead, she strode right back into the ring with the cap’ns of industry. Reinvesting her earnings, she exploited existing assets, developing a value-added product that, had she still been part of the Smartfood management team, would have been considered a brilliant line extension. Yep, that’s right, she found a new use for her white cheddar powder: instant mac ‘n’ cheese. Other entrepreneurs might have trembled at the thought of going mano a mano with King Kraft. But not our Annie.

With a daintily moistened forefinger, Annie tested the direction of popular culture and felt the gentle wind of organics blowing. Her new pasta convenience meal would be labeled “totally natural” (mind you, this slippery ’70s term has never had an official definition) and banish all ingredients ending in -ate, -yl and -one (at least those that aren’t a constituent of another ingredient, which, as long as they are Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS), are not required by the FDA to be listed on the label). The goods would be wrapped in an eye-assaulting purple box adorned by one nauseatingly cute rabbit, aka Bernie the bunny — cuddly design courtesy of Thomas J. Paul Inc., whose other accounts include such counterculture icons as M&M’s, Ritz and — wouldn’t you know it? — Kraft. The launch was studiously aw-shucks: Annie and cohorts tossed packages at ravenous skiers in resort parking lots. “If you like the product,” they said coyly, “don’t tell us. Ask for it at your grocer’s.” Up, up and away it went! By 2005, Annie’s Homegrown was selling over $34 million a year; still a gnat in the eye of King Kraft, but a gnat that rules the organic convenience-meal category.

Annie’s stinks. Ever caught a surprise whiff as you guide stove-top traffic at dinnertime? (Right rear pot cleared for takeoff. Climb to avoid hot and high left front.) The stuff is rank; think sweaty T-shirt marinated in a gym bag for a week. Yet kids, whose palates are usually so delicate, lap it up. Which leads one to wonder, what’s in those little hare-festooned envelopes anyway? Heroin? As a matter of fact, it’s pretty much the same thing that’s in the famous blue box: pasta, cheese, milk, salt. Granted, Annie’s has only nine ingredients while Kraft has 20, most of which, nasty as they sound, replace nutrients removed in processing or are naturally occurring and have a long history as additives. Just two Kraft ingredients raise the mercury on the toxic-meter: yellow dyes No. 5 and No. 6, which impart the infamous fluorescent hue.

But from a nutritional perspective, that’s the only time Annie’s lands a punch. The rest of the match is a draw. Annie’s has the same number of calories (Annie’s 270, Kraft 260), the same amount of sodium (Annie’s 550 mg, Kraft 580 mg), protein (Annie’s 10 g, Kraft 9 g) and fiber (Annie’s 1 g, Kraft 2 g), and a bit more fat (Annie’s 4.6 g, Kraft 2.5 g) and saturated fat (Annie’s 2.5 g, Kraft 1 g). But, you sputter, grasping at your last, best argument, “Annie’s is organic!” Not so fast, my friend. Only packages labeled organic are organic. Annie’s are labeled “totally natural,” which means, uh, which means … whatever you want it to mean, boys and girls! But it sure sounds good, doesn’t it? (Obviously aware that its reality lags behind the rhetoric, Annie’s has now begun retrofitting its recipe to include mostly organic ingredients.) Still, the truth is that Annie’s is hardly healthier than the day-glo orange mac ‘n’ cheese of the white-bread America of yesteryear.

OK, you whimper, maybe it’s not bulgur and lentil loaf, or salmon and spinach or even a peanut butter sandwich on whole grain bread, but Annie’s Homegrown offers an important advantage for my family. It’s easy. Very easy. And I need easy. After all, I’m A) a Very Important Professional racking up 60 billables weekly, B) an at-home ma/pa who can barely toggle the remote at the end of the day, or C) working through some culinary deficits (can’t heat water to 212 degrees F). So sorry to spoil your party. But making pasta with cheese from scratch is just as easy as mixing up a pot of Annie’s. Shall we give it a whirl?

OK, you caught me! There is one more step to the homemade: grating the cheese. But dare I say we’re talking Food Prep 101 here, a skill slightly above stirring and definitely below chopping. And if you really want to get fancy and actually cook something, you can make a white sauce so the cheese doesn’t clump. This forgotten kitchen art is so simple, an 11-year-old child can master it. A white sauce has infinite other applications, including that timeless WASP delicacy, chipped beef on toast. (For the more recherché among you, substitute prosciutto and blanched asparagus.) Or use it as a base for a “cream of,” as in cream of asparagus, cream of broccoli, cream of celery, cream of fennel and on through the vegetable alphabet.

Annie’s Homegrown out-bads McDonald’s and Coca-Cola because it plants a corporate beachhead right there in your family’s kitchen. Every time you reach for the rabbit, you’re delivering the message that the almighty brand trumps Mom or Dad’s efforts any day of the week. So, stand up, please, and receive a heartfelt thank-you from the American food industry. Where would they be without the culinary passivity and anesthetized palate you are so assiduously cultivating in the next generation?

Annie’s entry into full-blown brand-dom can be charted at the supermarket. In November, Withey’s company acquired its doppelgänger, Annie’s Naturals, whose line of salad dressings and Bar-B-Que sauces is also a health food store staple. There is now a whole shelf full of Homegrown products — mostly pasta-themed, although recently the company has detoured into the unabashedly unhealthy with a grab for the Goldfish market. There is simply no way to get a child past this section with its hundreds of Joe Camel-like logos beaming come-hither messages, unless you forcibly hold his or her head in the other direction.

My personal battle with Bernie & Co. is already lost. Take a peek in my cupboards and you’ll find a couple of boxes of Annie’s Shells & White Cheddar (the original), or one of the many other cheesy iterations (Curly Fettuccine With White Cheddar and Broccoli Sauce, D. W. Whole Wheat Pasta & Alfredo, Microwavable Mac & Cheese Meals, etc.). But while I’ve surrendered on the instant pasta, for principle’s sake, I feel I need to draw the line somewhere. I swear, not a single Annie’s Cheddar Bunny will cross my threshold. Or Bunny Graham. Or Bernie O. Or Organic Cheeseburger Macaroni Skillet Meal. Do you think we can get them to sign a nonproliferation treaty?

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White Sauce

1 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. white flour
1/2 to 2 cups milk

Melt butter in small frying pan over medium heat. Add flour and whisk until a smooth paste is formed. Add a tablespoon or so of milk and whisk until smooth. Repeat process until desired consistency is reached. For cheese sauce or as base for soup, this should be somewhere between ketchup and heavy cream. Remove from heat.