Costco is now selling a 27-pound bucket of macaroni and cheese. It sells for $89.99 but it is not, as you might assume, a bucket containing 27 pounds of mac and cheese all mixed together. Instead, the bucket contains six 30-serving zip-sealed pouches of elbow pasta and six 30-serving zip-sealed pouches of cheddar cheese sauce.
Nice to know you don't have to eat the whole bucketful right away. The special packaging has a shelf life of twenty years so you and your family would only have to eat 30 servings every 3.3 years. That doesn't seem too excessive, does it?
When I saw this, I thought at first they must be giving out free samples of this mac 'n' cheese at Costco warehouses across this great land of ours. It would be nice if we could taste it before we commit to that much of it.
But then I thought, "Maybe not." This is the kind of food that people purchase to have available in case there's a catastrophic tragedy and, say, all the Ralphs Markets are nuked or sentient iPads are now running the world and controlling the food supply. (Take a look at the "suggested serving" image above. After a hurricane has wiped out your city, a tiny garnish of parsley would certainly make things more appetizing.)
Whenever I see "Disaster Prep" meals, I remember some guy on TV back in the sixties who sold this kind of thing. Someone asked him how tasty it was and he said something like, "After a nuclear holocaust, you won't care how tasty it is. Your family will be thrilled to be able to eat my products instead of each other!" I thought that was a damn good sales pitch because, you know, nobody really wants to eat Grandma.