Blasphemy!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama says she dropped boxed macaroni and cheese from her family’s diet after her daughter couldn’t turn a block of cheese into cheese powder.

In an interview in the March issue of Cooking Light magazine, Mrs. Obama says Sam Kass, the family’s former personal chef, had taken a stand against the boxed variety, which includes processed cheese powder among the ingredients.

“He said there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food,” she said, crediting him with helping to eliminate processed food from their diet.

Kass gave her daughter Malia, who was about 8 years old at the time, a block of cheese and challenged her to turn the fresh cheese into powder.

“She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust,” Mrs. Obama says. “She was really focused on it and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of the story.”

As she marks the fifth anniversary of her anti-childhood-obesity initiative, the first lady says it feels like there’s “a new norm” in how families think about food and what’s healthy.