Before I Was A Food Blogger...

...I ate a lot of TV dinners and on a lark, I wrote a stupid letter to Con Agra Foods.

Obviously I was inspired by such humor books like Idiot Letters
and Letters from a Nut.This was the first and only one I sent out. I stumbled upon it recently and thought I'd share it with you, my readers.

Although after re-reading it, I'm glad I got into blogging.

A preface: The circumstances were all true, though the point of the letter was just to get a funny response back, not so much to complain.

I did get a reply from Con Agra a few weeks later, but it was a boring, boiler-plated letter that I have since misplaced. Included with it, however, was a coupon for a free Banquet frozen dinner!

ConAgra Foods
Consumer Affairs, Dept. B
P.O. Box 3768
Omaha, NE 68103-0768

April 3, 2002

Dear Sir or Madam:

I have been a Banquet Frozen Dinner consumer for quite a long time. Needless to say, I buy your product because of the value. That is to say, I expect that I will get what I pay for. However, when I recently purchased your Fish Stick meal, I discovered that there were only FOUR fish sticks in the package and not the FIVE that is shown on the box photo, which, coincidentally, has a prominent label proclaiming that the meal now contains “24% More Fish”. But because there were only four fish sticks when five was promised by the photo, this means that there is actually 20% LESS FISH in the meal! So your company should either:

- Put one more fish stick in the box to match the number of sticks in the box photo;

or
- Change the photograph on the box to show one less fish stick to match the number of fish sticks that are actually in the box;

or
- Change the label to say that there is 20% LESS FISH than the photo shows.

Also, how did you come up with such an odd statistic as “24% More Fish”? Why not a rounder number like 20% or 25%? It doesn’t seem that such a specific percentage could be something that an average consumer would be able to quantify or detect on an individual fish stick, especially since the sticks seem to shrink in size the longer it is cooked in the microwave.

Sincerely,
E. Goei

P.S. This is an extra post for this week; amends for the fact that I was late in posting my regular review. Hope you enjoyed it.

*Special thanks to Monster Munching reader Julie. She e-mailed me today, just to check that I was okay when she didn't see a new post this week.