Honest Lean Cuisine

Lean Cuisine has introduced a line of six frozen dinners called Honestly Good. Mr. Tidbit might have chosen a name that didn't suggest that the more than 100 other Lean Cuisine offerings were dishonest or not very good, but that is a quibble.

Unlike most of the other Lean Cuisine products, the Honestly Good offerings are complete dinners — meat (in five of the six it's a single whole piece: three feature a grilled chicken breast filet; one is a coconut-crusted salmon filet; one is a grain-crusted fish filet, only the beef dinner contains cut-up meat); a vegetable combination; an interesting starch (whole-grain pilaf, brown rice with wheat berries, etc.), and a sauce in a separate packet.

The sauces all sound to Mr. Tidbit as if they live up to the "good" part of the name: The chicken varieties have honey citrus, roasted red pepper or pomegranate sauce (he tried and liked that one); the salmon has lemongrass sauce; the (unnamed) fish comes with plum ginger sauce and the beef has pineapple black pepper sauce. Also in the "good" (if self-congratulatory) category is the note on the package that they're donating a portion of the vegetables grown for these dinners "to local communities."

Mr. Tidbit supposes that the "honestly" part of the name is reflected in the various all- or no- pledges on the front of the package: "100% all-natural," "no artificial ingredients, no preservatives" and "minimally processed." Other than the rice starch listed as an ingredient of the chicken breast in the dinner Mr. Tidbit bought, everything in the list might have been found in his own kitchen at one time or another. (Nothing like maltodextrin or disodium guanylate in the ingredients.)

At one discount store where most Lean Cuisine products were $2.89 or 3.09, the Honestly Good dinners were $4.79.

Honestly.

Frozen bananas

Dole's new frozen Banana Dippers are slices of banana enrobed in dark chocolate (chopped almonds optional). The box contains six bags of four slices each, and costs, depending on the store, between $3 and $4 — in any case, lots more than 10 ounces of bananas.

Al Sicherman