According to the labels, the California Lemon Cake and Chocolate Cake were composed of exaclty the same ingredients. Photos by Greggory Moore
The setting for this story is Fresh & Easy, but presumably the caveat is universal. Label this story: Don’t believe everything you read—even the labels.
I’m a relatively healthy eater, so I try to satisfy my sweet tooth with minimal body pollution. And since I’m always on the hunt for new and better options, I do a lot of label-reading.
Fresh & Easy may not be as fabulous as Trader Joe’s, but over time they have offered a small selection of dessert foods that are low fat and with less in the way of preservatives, etc., than generally permeates such sweet stuff. Usually I’ll just pick up their F&E-brand chocolate bundt cake, but on this trip there was a Linda Ellen’s Bakery California Lemon Cake I had never seen. Looking at the label, it seemed I had struck gold. Only 2 grams of fat per serving?! Although I know from a few baker friends that delicious low-fat desserts are far more makeable than their relatively rarity would suggest, this sounded too good to be true, considering that previously I had checked the labels of other Linda Ellen’s cakes—like the Chocolate and Carrot cakes next to the lemon in the open-topped refrigerator display case—and found them to have been made without regard to fat content.
Perhaps the specific ingredients in the lemon cake accounted for the difference? I scrutinized the label more closely to see whether I could divine the magical phrases (egg whites? skim milk?) that might explain how this was the cake for me. I wanted to believe, damn it. It looked so tasty!
As I perused the list of ingredients, instead of finding that desired explanation, I kept stumbling across ingredients that, despite my near-ignorance of all things culinary, I was pretty sure were not in that yellow cake tempting me from the other side of its plastic housing. Cocoa powder? Dark cocoa powder? Red and green food coloring? Chocolate frosting? No, clearly something was amiss. I selected other lemon cakes to see if perhaps this was a simple anomaly: each was the same.
I picked up the Chocolate Cake next to it for comparison. The nutritional information was totally different (including a far higher fat content). But as I began to pore over the ingredients, I was struck by the similarity. More than similarity: the two sets were identical.
Wanting to find out what was going on, I attempted to get in touch with Fresh & Easy. But over the course of days, just as had happened when I had written on F&E’s announcement that the company was on its way out of business, it was literally impossible to reach anyone at F&E’s corporate office. Employees at various F&E stores could fair no better. Finally an employee suggested I try the pattern of numbers that would get me directly to corporate office extensions, and through trial and error I finally managed to get a real, live human to pick up the phone. Explaining my issue, she told me she would see to having the proper party return my call.
{loadposition latestbusiness}The next day I received an incoming call from a funny-looking number (too few digits) that was identified as emanating from Canada. It turned out to be a F&E representative, who dutifully listened to my tale (I spared her the stuff about my sweet tooth and hunt for healthier satiety) and assured me that the matter would be investigated, and that someone from “the product team” would get back to me.
I cannot say whether the matter was investigated; all I can say for sure is that no one ever got back to me, and that all of my various follow up calls went unanswered. I never even got a straight answer on whether Linda Ellen’s Bakery is an independent distributor or a F&E brand.
A month-and-a-half later I went back to Fresh & Easy to check that California Lemon Cake’s ingredients—which now appeared far more credible, including all kinds of lemon stuff (natural lemon juice, lemon powder, natural lemon rind), and no chocolate frosting.
But is the nutritional information reliable? Is it possible that a 75g serving of a cake whose second ingredient is whole eggs and that contains heavy cream and coconut has only 2g of fat?
I hope so, because now I had to try it: yummy! But I know from experience that just because the label says so, it may not be true.