Lean Cuisine
Recall Label

Lean Cuisine Recalls Frozen Meals With Plastic Pieces, So There Is a Limit to How Much Plastic They’re Comfortable With

Let’s get real: when you nuke a frozen diet meal, your expectations are low. The best you can hope for is some kind of rubbery animal protein smothered in a cloying sweet or salty sauce, a side of gummy rice or potatoes, and maybe a few spoonfuls of some kind of fruity goo as a palate cleanser. If it tastes like plastic, well, you wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sacrifice we all make when trying to lose weight.

But apparently, there is such a thing as too much artificial flavor. And Lean Cuisine is recalling thousands of frozen dinners because of it. Just over a week ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a recall for around 92,206 pounds of the diet brand’s baked chicken meals. The reason: they may be “contaminated with extraneous materials,” like, oh, “pieces of white hard plastic.”

It appears that pieces of plastic broke off a conveyor belt and somehow ended up in the meals’ mashed potatoes. Consumers were the first to sound the alarm. We can only imagine their disappointment when they bit into what should have been a fluffy cloud of carbs only to find an unusually crunchy texture instead. (Our gums are hurting just writing that sentence.)

Seriously, though, food production mistakes like this can be dangerous. This has earned the status of a “Class I” recall, meaning there is a “reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.” Yikes. Way to put the “die” in “diet,” Lean Cuisine!

Wondering if anything in your freezer is defective? Look for meals labeled as “white meat chicken with stuffing, red skin mashed potatoes & gravy” with a lot code of 0246595911. They were packaged on Sept. 2 and bear a “best before” date of October 2021.

If you have anything matching that description in your freezer, you should toss it. Better yet, just get rid of all your diet food. It can’t possibly be that good for you anyway – and we guarantee it tastes like garbage, whether it contains plastic pieces or not.

Cover Photo: USDA

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