The pandemic has been a very interesting time for our relationship with food, from what we eat, to how we get it, to how we eat it. Some have taken up new hobbies like baking their bread, or jarring preserves, or gardening. Others, meanwhile have leaned heavily into delivered foods.
For some it’s been a time to renew or establish for the first time a commitment to healthful eating. If so, that’s a development hopefully standing the test of time. But maybe you found comfort in the embrace of junk food during a difficult time because it sparked critical joy.
If the latter is you, that’s great, because it means you survived and it helped you do so. And if you survived partly thanks to Detroit-style pizza delivery or the like, there is a particular product you may be most interested in hearing about, and it’s called simply, Stouffer’s Lasagnamac.
Stouffer’s calls the limited time item“the ultimate comfort food", and it is a lasagna dish featuring a layer of macaroni and cheese. As with Stouffer’s other offerings, it is a frozen microwave meal, offering the speed and ease to which devotees of the ‘tv dinner’ have become accustomed. Since so many have had such a deficit of energy for even such basic things as food preparation, that is key.
According to Stouffer’s brand marketing manager Megan McLaughlin, "Bringing together two of our best-selling products is a simple way to express the intent of our new marketing campaign, Happyfull. We worked to create a recipe that will make our fans feel both happy and full. LasagnaMac is a great example of how our innovation is anchored in consumer obsession – and not to mention, it's incredibly delicious."
A macaroni and cheese lasagna is not the first unusual combination of distinct foods, with many having come into existence in, notably, the condiment realm. Relatively recent attention has attended the creation of such items as Mayochup and its ilk, and years before that there was Goobers, which swirled peanut butter and jelly in a single jar.
When you think about it, it’s not such a wild divergence from food reality. After all, lasagna is already a pasta dish with cheese integrated- exactly like macaroni and cheese. Italian cuisine can, in that way, be seen sometimes as a relatively small number of ingredients combined in endless varieties to create different dishes. In this case the main differences are the structure of the pasta, the exact variety of cheese, and the presence or absence of tomato.
And the bottom line is that there are truly no “bad” foods that inherently run counter to the body’s needs and therefore cannot be eaten. There are only foods that can and should be eaten in larger quantities, with greater regularity, and those which you are best served by eating on a more moderate basis. If you find a food derided as “garbage” to be delicious and fun, you are not at all barred from having even a lot of it in a moment if not so very much in the long term.
Lasagnamac is no exception. Together with foods that fit more comfortably into the food pyramid, it is a worthy addition to the pantheon of foods that fuel your body, and perhaps an all time champion of foods that nourish your emotional state.
