Strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups: Now With More Pears And No Strawberries

I've always sorta assumed Fruit Roll-Ups didn't have any real fruit in them...but also kinda assumed they did. Maybe they had little "fruit bits," or something. Little ground-up fruit-bits that granted the product the right to be advertised as "made with real fruit." The same way that I assumed Lemonheads had little bits of real lemon...because they have a picture of a guy with a head made out of a lemon on the packaging.

And it appears that the Strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups, at the center of a lawsuit brought on by California resident Annie Lam, does have real fruit in it...just not any strawberries.

Instead, the product contains pears from concentrate. So basically Lam is saying: "If I wanted some damn pear Fruit Roll-Ups, I'd have bought some pear Fruit Roll-Ups!"

But I would imagine that the larger issue at the heart of this lawsuit -- which was recently OK'd to go on to trial -- is that General Mills presents Fruit Roll-Ups, in its packaging, as seeming like a healthy fruit-based food. For example, the box of the flavor in question prominently displays strawberries, along with the tag at the top: "Made With Real Fruit." This, plus the images, would lead any but the most jaded and suspicious shopper (and Lord knows I'm slowly getting there) to assume that there might be actual strawberries in the product.

But a bigger issue for me is isn't about fruit specificity but rather simply the other ingredients to be found in Fruit Roll-Ups: corn syrup, dried corn syrup, sugar and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil." Consenting adults should feel free to indulge in the decadence of such a snack, but this doesn't seem like something children should eat on a regular basis. And yet growing up, that Fruit Roll-Up "scroll" was an ubiquitous staple of many a student's lunchbox. I daresay it had the aura, among kid and parent alike, of being somewhat of a "health food" -- it had fruit in it, after all. And you could bite eye-holes in it and make a superhero mask.