I’ll admit, I’ve been known to be impulsive and make poor decisions at times. When returning home from a shopping trip with bags full of pretzels, I sometimes get a twinge of regret, as if some part of me knows that I’ve done a very foolish thing. Nothing, however, measures up to the sheer, soul-crushing remorse I feel after cooking up a batch of Tesco Macaroni Cheese Pasta. In my defense, I was really hungry — not just the regular sort of hungry; the kind where I’d gladly eat stale pizza, cold leftovers, anything with enough nutritional value to kick-start my digestive system. The kind of hunger experienced when one realizes that half the day has been frittered away without so much as a breakfast.

I like to think I was justified in my decision.

The first warning should have come when I opened not one, but two packets of the vile stuff — largely due to its seemingly small size, and my hunger which can only be described as “immense”. The whiff of the artificial cheese-like powder assaulted my nostrils like a legion of tiny trebuchets, the kind of vile stale-cheddar aroma that is reserved only for the most cheaply-made of cheesesque foodstuffs. Driven on by my terrible urge to feed, in went both packets to the requisite combination of milk, water and butter, in to the churning abyss which — while at once fairly tranquil — soon resembled a boiling pit of sulphur, threatening (and occasionally succeeding) to spill over and forever taint the surface of my oven. The aroma surrounding the pan was one I won’t soon forget, a sickening stench of stale cheddar, the vivid yellow colour — my phone camera hardly doing it justice — merely adding to the experience.

The real tragedy of the story is that a large portion of this disgusting maelstrom has ended up squarely in my stomach, through equal parts desperate hunger and a desire to avoid wasting money. The flavour is every bit as bad as I’d imagined, punctuated by the occasional, tiny nugget of dry cheese powder which managed to escape the moisture by hiding within one of the tiny pasta tubes, an experience not unlike realizing that raisin you just bit down on is actually a spider. While perhaps not my most harrowing mealtime experience, it ranks up in the top twenty or so.

And so, I must ask you all, for your own safety and mental wellbeing: don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t buy this terrible, terrible mixture. Please.