Mac & cheese dishes that are not actually mac & cheese

The name macaroni and cheese (mac & cheese or mac 'n' cheese for short) is, or at least should be, self-explanatory. However, it appears that most people forget the very first word in the name and proceed to throw together any type of pasta with cheese and call it mac & cheese. This, in my opinion, is wrong.

The following is a list of so-called "mac & cheese" dishes that, alas, were not.

• Evol Truffle Parmesan Mac & Cheese: this dish, while delicious, is made with tubetti pasta. Tubetti means "little tubes" in Italian. Macaroni noodles are also little tubes, but tubetti resembles uncurved large macaroni cut into even shorter (straight) tubes. Verdict: not mac & cheese.
• Lean Cuisine Marketplace Vermont White Cheddar Mac & Cheese: it just amazes me how brands will market their dishes as "mac & cheese" and then brazenly list the ingredients below the name, including the type of non-macaroni pasta in the dish. I mean hello??? That's like saying your brand's leather jacket is genuine leather and then putting 'man-made materials' underneath. This entree is made with cavatappi pasta, which is like if macaroni noodles were all connected into ribbed spirals. It does not count as mac & cheese.
• any boxed mac & cheese mix made with shell or character-shaped noodles: this one is especially frustrating because usually these are by Kraft, the gateway for most of us to the world of mac & cheese. Shells are not macaroni, and character-shaped pasta is cute, but neither type counts as mac & cheese. 
• Panera Mac & Cheese: literally small shell pasta in alfredo sauce. Not mac, and while technically their sauce is not alfredo but white cheddar, it is not the right color. They barely tried. Not mac & cheese.
• Chili's Pepper Jack Mac 'N' Cheese: First off, macaroni & cheese should not be spicy. This dish was hot enough that it was hard to taste the cheese, which is a minus in my opinion. Secondly, this is rotini pasta!! Rotini doesn't even look like macaroni in the least! At least tubetti and cavatappi noodles sort of look like macaroni noodles, if you squint a little. This outrageous insult against mac and cheese gets this star:

Here are some food blogger infractions: This cookbook writer on The New York Times whose recipe called for any type of pasta; Martha Stewart, who should definitely know better; Ina Garten, ditto (plus it sounds too fancy and kinda gross); this food blogger who was led astray by Kraft's shell mac & cheese; another using big shells; slow cooker big shells; medium shells; another "any shape"-er; this student who used PENNE and rightfully deleted the webpage; this hypocritical website; oh look another cavatappi recipe; several AllRecipes offenders whose recipes contain fusilli, big shells, mini shells, and rotini; and my personal favorite: this food blogger called Mac and Cheese Chick who made a knockoff recipe for Panera's mac (shells) and cheese using rotini!!! There are probably tons more but I got tired of looking for them.

So in googling pasta charts for this post, I realized macaroni (the type in boxed Kraft mac & cheese) has a different name in Italian, and probably the other types of macaroni noodles do as well. What does this mean for my pedantry? Well, since mac & cheese is an (I'm assuming) American invention, let's go with the English names for the proper pastas used in mac & cheese dishes. Mac & cheese dishes can be made with:

1. traditional macaroni noodles (like in the Kraft m&c boxes)
2. elbow macaroni
3. that big smooth macaroni that is just like elbow macaroni but a bit bigger

That is all. Thank you for your time.

Update: November 23, 2016
A few weeks ago I went to Panera and ordered their mac & cheese, and it appears that they have changed their noodles. They are short, very wide versions of macaroni noodles and are no longer small shells. I texted my BFF, who is basically a Panera expert, and she confirmed that the noodles indeed used to be small shells! It appears this blog post has brought about positive change. Bravo, Panera!