Listen, if you didn’t logically deduce that Lean Cuisine (the dinner most favored by TV housewives!) was full of chemicals, then we’ve got a big beautiful bridge to sell you. Trust us: If something costs $2.99 and promises to help you lose loads of weight, it’s got to be loaded with more than just grass-fed beef and fresh veggies. Still, Lean Cuisine advertises its delicious box offerings as “preservative free” and you can’t just do that without it being true.
According to TMZ — which has given up on the celebrity news beat now that Kanye West’s meeting with Trump has signaled that the end is pretty f*cking nigh — Nestle, which makes the frozen dinners, is being sured by Courtney Ross, a woman who paid too much money for a healthy four-cheese pizza and was shocked to learn “the truth“:
Ross says to her chagrin, she checked the label and saw the pie contained citric acid, designed to preserve flavor and freshness. She says other companies fess up when they use citric acid, acknowledging it’s a preservative. She mentions Hungry Man, Jimmy Dean and DiGiorno.
Is citric acid really that terrible? It’s in many of your favorite fruits and vegetables and is also an essential part of any “large-scale” cheese-making operation. But for Ross, who paid more than she would have otherwise for a meal with no preservatives (even though she bought it from a freezer at CVS) it’s the principle that really matters here. And she wants Nestle to stop advertising its dinners as “preservative-free” when all they’re doing is telling lies.
Will she win this one? Unless Ross truly knows federal regulations on food — which are famously deceptive — it doesn’t sound like it. And it sounds even less likely now that Nestle has responded, calling the accusations baseless and saying that they will vigorously defend themselves if it comes to that. Personally, we’d just take a truck of Crunch bars and call it a day.
