Dear Lean Cuisine Fiesta Grilled Chicken “Entrée”,

Your redesigned, sexy, mod-looking box caught my eye recently as I was perusing the frozen foods aisle.  I found the perfect proportion of stark white to blood orange packaging to be provocative.  I opened the door and moved in for a closer look.

Being someone who possesses a BFA and has had years of color theory, I know all about what orange does to us humans psychologically.  You bet I do.  For starters, it is proven to be a stimulus of the sexual organs!  Damn right it’s a Fiesta! It can also be beneficial to the digestive system and strengthening the immune system.  Additionally, orange has only positive affects on your emotional state, and relieves feelings of self-pity, lack of self-worth and unwillingness to forgive. Orange opens your emotions and is a terrific antidepressant.

Hooray!  Happy Happy easily digested Lean Orgasm Chicken!  Hats off, well done, you guys in the design department really have your shit together over there.  Kudos.

I also appreciated your stylistic typographic approach, in which all text is lowercase.  THIS CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS THE OPPOSITE OF SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS.  in this case it can be used to give a melancholic, casual, hip kind of feel.   i.e. McDonalds – i’m lovin’ it.

I understand, and even appreciate your cunning and calculated advertising and marketing techniques, and the lengths at which you’ll go to woo us.

Now mind you, all of this takes place in a split second, and to the untrained and unsuspecting eye, all of this takes place behind the curtain of your consciousness.  It’s like magic, it happens every day, all around you.  One of my favorite examples is this:

You’ve seen that logo hundreds of times, right?  I wonder how many of you ever recognized the arrow in the negative space between E and x?  Magic.

Now, switching from graphically educated consumer to mother of young kids, I, like every other mother on the planet, do not have a large allotment of time in which to eat lunch.  The fattening and rather disgusting combinations that I may or may not get to shove down my feeding hole while tying shoes and searching for my keys on the way out the door usually falls about 50 miles south of The Food Pyramid.

2 PBJ crusts or perhaps a chicken nugget, half of a cheese stick, a few grapes, and the last hit off of a Capri sun.   4 minutes and 600 calories of dissatisfaction, that’s what we get for lunch.

I felt a vague stirring in my loins as I slowly fondled the white meat chicken in a mexican-style cream sauce with a seasoned rice blend entrée, part of your “culinary collection”.  I slowly flipped the box over, her underbelly revealing a mere 260 calories, ready in 4 minutes…and into my cart she went.

The next day, I punctured the plastic on top as instructed and slipped it into the microwave while I was making lunch for the kids.  Ding!  4 minutes later I was peeling back the plastic to give it a stir.

I was feeling very civilized, so I decided I would put it into an actual bowl.

That was my first mistake.  I should have never taken it out of its natural habitat.  The portion was equivalent to a can of Fancy Feast.

Next, for an entrée that starts off with “Grilled Chicken”, there were only 2 small pieces of chicken.  That’s it.  Two.  I stared down into the bowl that looked more like somebody’s leftovers.  In a fit of frustration I quickly grated half a block of cheddar, threw it on top, and popped it back in the microwave for a minute.  I then topped it with a heaping spoonful of sour cream, you know, since it was mexican.  I sat at the table to eat with the kids, and 6 spoonfuls later, I was finished.

My 260 calorie “entree” had turned into an 800 calorie fiasco.  That’s what you should name it more accurately,  Fiasco Rice with Chicken Afterthought.  And you should use Gray to symbolize the detachment, isolation and sorrow one feels upon witnessing it’s actual size.  It was like taking a really hot guy to bed, and discovering he has micropenis.

So, in spite of your provocative orange packaging and your casually hip lowercase letters, the old adage holds true; you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, or in this case, entrée by it’s color.