It feels like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared war on tastiness. In his May 22 “Make America Healthy Again” report targeting ultraprocessed foods, he had an amnesic disregard for the toxic pleasures he grew up with. He’s come up just shy of telling Americans that anything delicious will leave us glued to insulin pumps.
Anyway, that’s how a United States cabinet secretary inspired my sudden craving for Wonder Bread. The Trump administration’s whitewashing of American history from our libraries is bad enough. Whitewashing white bread from my digestive history? Unspeakable.
Riding the bread aisle of an aging medium-brow Los Angeles grocery store that appeared bravely oblivious to the iffy Whole Foods-inspired religion of organic everything, I noticed the word “grain” was everywhere. Just as I realized I didn’t really know what a grain was if not followed by “of salt,” I saw bags of Wonder Bread huddled in shame on a bottom shelf.
The future turned present: The lusciously larded foods of my youth were already beside me on the endangered species list.
Within minutes, my cart held an old-school reunion while it still could: Wonder Bread, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Kellogg’s Corn Pops (nee Sugar Pops), Entenmann’s doughnuts (with the dark brown waxy coating they don’t even pretend to call chocolate on the box), Hungry Man (nee Swanson’s) fried chicken — OMG: frozen White Castle burgers! — Nestlé’s Quik, now Nesquik (“Same tooth decay, one fewer syllable!”), whole milk, the once un-P.C. Uncle Ben’s rice and grossly un-P.C. Aunt Jemima’s syrup (both revamped), Oscar Mayer bologna and, just to keep current, maximum strength Pepcid. I paid the nonjudgmental self-checkout machine and walked off to find my America in a caloric time warp.
This would be my own Marcel Proust madeleine quest — childhood morsels as time machine. (Not to say that if Proust lived today he’d be writing about Froot Loops, but he’d surely mourn our dietary penal colony.)
For all the reputational beatings baby boomers take, we’re unmatched at being nostalgic for our earlier lives. America reneged on all it promised us — free love, world peace, an hour of being unreachable — so it makes some countercultural sense to try to buy back our more innocent years, memories rife with the gooey euphoria of the very foods that could soon to be denied to us.
Now that I’m at an age when digestion requires planning, I made a schedule for my intake of passé foodstuffs, declawing them with intervening meals featuring (snobby) kale, (prissy) beets and (unpronounceable) açai. But trying Wonder Bread immediately was irresistible.
The bag, still squeezable as Charmin, now featured a QR code to win a trip somewhere. That touch of modernity tipped off the content: The slices weren’t quite white anymore. They had turned a whiter shade of yellow, like plain white tees laundered in a load of Lakers jerseys. The Wonder people must have caved to nutritionists who had some problem with bleach.
Sticking to your guns. No one sticks to their guns anymore.
One bite confirmed that at some point, Wonder Bread as I knew it died from a case of late onset nutrition, its taste-canceling healthfulness unworthy of the Borden American cheese and Gulden’s mustard sandwich I’d smother it with in 1968 while mooning over the girl who sat beside me in English. I vaguely remembered her flowing hair blocking me from cheating off her test paper … but this (off) white bread couldn’t call up her face. Rather than stirring memories, it left me glancing at my dog, Ike, thankful that someone around the house was aging even faster than I was.
Along with Tet, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Chicago, Kraft mac and cheese had a big year in 1968. Worried that I’d stalled at 42 pounds, my mom would gorge me on those soppy tubes she lovingly termed “fattening” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would menacingly term “poison.”
But to my horror, the macaroni wasn’t the puffy, hollow comma we call elbow. Instead I found Trivial Pursuit-like disks inside the blue cardboard box. These went quickly flaccid under boiling water, but (but!) the globby cheese did kindle wisps of my what-me-worry childhood.
Unfortunately, the half-filled box made for half the stick-to-your-arteries meal of 1968. Scanning my kitchen, I beamed forward 18 years to 1986.
In those days, for critical sports events I’d walk from my no-square-foot studio on East 63rd to my friend Barry’s two-bedroom on East 71st, always stopping to buy Entenmann’s doughnuts. For Game 6 of the Mets-Astros National League Championship Series, I presciently bought two boxes.
After 16 agonizing innings and 14 doughnuts, the Mets were World Series-bound. In 2025, one Entenmann’s was the metabolic time machine I’d been seeking. My digestive tract felt like it recaptured the invulnerability it had when I had maniacally rooted for strangers playing baseball under a dome in Houston.
After two more Entenmann’s, however, I had to go a week on the Kennedy diet: (skinless) chicken breast, (joyless) lentil soup, (unpronounceable) quinoa.
The time I most wanted to relive was college. Back then I considered breakfast as only one of the three most important meals of the day. A bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Pops ignited my mornings of higher learning. Now it only sparked a tutorial on sugar shock. After decades of 1 percent Lactaid, whole milk poured like Elmer’s glue. Bummer.
Many days later, I halfheartedly sampled Oscar Mayer bologna (enough salt to cause hypertension in a dolphin), then drearily opened the freezer. Even in our nutritional police state, it was shocking how prominently the Hungry Man box listed counts of calories, fats and sodium. All it was missing was a 20 percent off coupon for angioplasty.
My mom claims she “NEVER made TV dinners. You only had them at T____’s house because his parents were cheapskates.” Pause. “I remember making chicken in the Rotiss-O-Mat the night President Kennedy was assassinated ….”
Perhaps that’s why the fried chicken took me nowhere. At least it was exceptionally not horrible. Ike adored it. When you start comparing your dining experience with your dog’s, it’s time to reassess.
In 2025, the search for self via food is futile. We live too long, our mental bandwidth too glutted to make involuntary memory voluntary. We’ve all heard you can’t go home again, and when it comes to unlimited-breadsticks America, maybe it’s for the best.
Peter Mehlman was a writer and producer for “Seinfeld.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Our Doughnuts, Ourselves appeared first on New York Times.
