Green mush isn’t high on my list of appealing things to eat.  But if you’re going to sell green mush to people, you should at least give them the sort of green mush they think they’re buying…

Lawsuit stirs up guacamole labeling controversy

Peanut butter is made from peanuts, tomato paste is made from tomatoes, and guacamole is made from avocados, right?

Wrong. The guacamole sold by Kraft Foods Inc., one of the bestselling avocado dips in the nation, includes modified food starch, hefty amounts of coconut and soybean oils, and a dose of food coloring. The dip contains precious little avocado, but many customers mistake it for wholly guacamole.

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles woman sued the Northfield, Ill.-based food company, alleging that it committed fraud by calling its dip "guacamole." Her lawyer says suits against other purveyors of "fake guacamole" could be filed soon.

I’ve been carefully parsing the lables on food ever since the early 70s when I took my first bite of something I thought was a slice of cheese, but upon more careful inspection turned out to be merely something called "cheese food".  By the time they came out with Country Time Lemonade Drink I wasn’t being fooled anymore.  Lemonade Drink, is it?  I know what lemonade is, and I know what a drink is, but a "lemonade drink" is probably lemonade like "cheese food" is cheese.

But the Kraft product, near as I can tell, was simply labeled "Guacamole Dip".  So I guess the argument here is how much guacamole does a guacamole dip have to have in it before you need to start calling it something else.  Like…guacamole food flavored dip by-product, or something…

Learning to carefully parse the syntax on product packaging when I was still a kid may be one reason I eventually became a software engineer.  It’s sure as hell why I subscribe to Consumer Reports…