“Strawberry — Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors.” (Lifted from a cereal box.1) It’s hard to find a better bit of obfuscation out there, meaning Legal went above and beyond in making Marketing toe the line of provable claims.
Just what does “Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors” actually mean? Does it mean natural strawberry flavor, along with other natural flavors? Does it mean the cereal is naturally flavored with other natural flavors (just not necessarily strawberry)? And why not make it more direct with “naturally flavored with natural flavors”, or even “naturally flavored”?2 Heck, a comma would end the confusion.
The ingredient list revealed not one mention of strawberry, unless it was hiding among the scientific poly-syllabic chemical names at the bottom of the listed contents. Natural flavor shows up- as just that- without further explanation.
Taste-testing revealed that not only are there no dehydrated chunks of strawberry present, the flavor is anything but strawberry-like. Maybe there was an astringent element, but that could have been the age of the soy milk3 used to accompany it.
So what might the flavor actually be? I suppose one could add a tablespoon of dirt and call it a natural flavor, but not for lubricants along the production line. Perhaps they hang a pint of strawberries over the bagging machine and hope occasional molecules of strawberry essence drift to the cereal below. It is truly a mystery. But this doesn’t have to be a single rant; there are three other such “flavors” to try.
- We live in litigious times so I‘m hesitant to expose the maker or the cereal in question.
- Honestly, the less ambiguous you make it, the more open you leave yourself to an irate retiree with too much unplanned time on his hands trying to generate interest in a class action.
- Oops, I may have stumbled into another food borne controversy. If there is no actual milk in soy milk, can it still be called soy milk? See also: almond milk.
(From the Best of BoomSpeak, 2019)
Garth Fromme bears no actual malice toward the Quaker Oats Company, but he does get miffed at chicanery no matter its source. He is in his fourth life, still struggling to deal with this unnatural state called “retirement.”
