Price: $3.00 on sale
Serving: 1 creation, 7.1oz.
Calories: 450
Fat: 26%, 17g
Cholesterol: 18%, 55mg
Sodium: 45%, 1090mg
Protein: 25g
Carbs: 17%, 50g
Fiber: 16%, 4g
Sugar: 13g
Weight Watchers Points: 10 Points

Oscar Mayer says: Oscar Mayer shaved mesquite smoked turkey breast, Kraft monterey jack cheese with jalapeno peppers, Kraft southwestern style ranch dressing, Kraft garden salsa on a country white sub roll.

Abi says: When I saw these on sale at my local Safeway I turned to the guy next to me, who happened to be a stranger, and said ‘Oh man, these things are awful.’ And then I bought two, because my mission is to confuse people at the grocery store.

So, what does cheap (but in reality, really freaking expensive for some bread and meat) get you? It starts with a super-soft roll. If you are at all familiar with Wonder Bread, you know what you’re getting here. Next, you get to top the bread yourself, getting meat juice and dressing and such all over your hands.

I have to admit that I was pleased with the amount of turkey included in this sandwich. It most closely resembled a packed of the Louis Buddig ultra-thin turkey. I love that stuff. For those of you not familiar with Louis Buddig or Land-o-Frost products, just imagine meat paper.

There was enough meat that I was able too eat a few of the slices while assembling the sandwich and still have enough to make a presentable hoagie. Next I topped it with the perfectly shaped sliced of jalapeno jack. Before topping the cheese and meat layers with the other half of the bun I did two things:

1. Decided that Kraft garden salsa resembles nothing more than tomato sauce and tossed it (sorry to those of you who wanted to know how it tastes).
2. Spread Southwestern style ranch on the bread and then realized that warm ranch dressing sounds like pretty much the grossest thing ever.

Unable to reverse my Ranch Dressing Decision, I put the sandwich in the microwave, heated if for a minute (melty cheese!) and dug in.

First impression: Goo.

When you heat ultra-processed lunchmeat, white bread, cheese and flavored ranch it all turns into a mass of gunk. Without any lettuce, sprouts, tomato, cucumbers or onion, this sandwich featured nothing crisp, nothing that indicated ‘Hey, you’re not just eating hot meat. This is a meal!’ Ugh. Separately I enjoyed the building blocks for this sandwich, but once they were put together and microwaved I found myself eating the sandwich as fast as possible just so that I wouldn’t have to deal with having it in my mouth anymore (I was hungry and running late to catch a train).

I sincerely enjoy eating hot turkey sandwiches made from freshly carved meat. I do not enjoy heated up sliced lunch meat. I also do not like paying to put together a sandwich. Sadly, there’s still another one of these in the fridge. I’m going to eat it cold or make it for George and pretend that I picked it up from the Safeway deli counter and see what he thinks.

Price: Provided by PR Company
SRP: $2.46
Serving: 1 pocket, 4.5oz.
Calories: 260
Fat: 11%, 7g
Cholesterol: 8%, 25mg
Sodium: 24%, 580mg
Protein: 12g
Carbs: 13%, 39g
Fiber: 14%, 4g
Sugar: 11g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Hot/Lean Pockets says: Roasted Turkey and Ham with low fat cheese with sauce in a crust.

Abi says: A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Nestle’s public relations people. They were writing to inform me that I’d be receiving multiple boxes of Lean Pockets in approximately 24 hours.

“Awesome,” I thought, knowing that the Hot Pockets category on HeatEatReview.com is sorely lacking reviews of anything but plain cheese pockets. And then I realized that they were sending that box to my old office, the one in Washington, DC.

I am in California. So, I sent an email to the PR folks letting them know about my new address. Visions of pepperoni danced in my head while I waited for the FedEx guy to show up with a box of dry-ice-encased Lean Pockets. Pepperoni Lean Pockets. I love pepperoni.

When the Lean Pockets arrived and were unpacked and sitting on my counter I realized that I had made a dreadful mistake. These were not pepperoni-containing items. They were not even the chicken fajita variety (which you should try, it is awesome), no these were all cheddar and chicken and brocolli combos.

Hmmmm. I put the boxes of pockets in the freezer and stayed away from microwave food for a couple of days, planning my dive into the world of Lean Pockets . . . I would get George to eat half of them.

My entre came the next day when George asked me if we had anything to eat.

“Yeah, I got some Hot Pockets the other day. You can have one of those.”
“Do I have to review them?”
“No, you just have to leave one for me to review.” In my mind my hands were rubbing together the way that evil super-geniuses rub their hands together when they are thinking about the destruction of the world.

George pulled a box out of the freezer and the plan fell apart.

“These aren’t Hot Pockets. These are Lean Pockets.” He said with disgust.
“You like Lean Pockets.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, those chicken fajita ones.” Do they even make those?
“I don’t see any chicken fajita ones here.”

Sigh.

I’d be alone in enduring the Lean Pocket marathon. I decided to start with the most innocuous(-seeming) in the bunch: Turkey, Ham and Cheese. I enjoyed sandwiches that contained turkey, ham and cheese. There should be no reason for me to dislike a pocket sandwich using those same items.

Holy freaking crap is this thing awful. I know that the idea is that you can have a potentially ‘healthy’ or ‘diet’ item and get to eat some hot melty cheese, but the reality of the matter is that this is bad, bad cheese. Low rent cheese. Ghetto cheese. This cheese reminds me of when I was a kid and we’d get food from the government that came in strict black and white packaging.

That sort of cheese. Lovers of Kraft Singles will probably adore this cheese. I found it to be watery, which is disgusting because we want cheese that is melty and gooey, but not actually a liquid. Viscosity is very, very important in melted cheese.

Nestled in that cheese was the meat. The weird, weird, meat. The photo on the box shows lovingly sliced and stacked deli meat. The reality is that the meat comes in ultra-thin, 1/2 inch-wide, 3 inch long strips. Band-Aids of meat, if you will. Really, really flat band-aids. I tried each of the meat-strips separately and have to admit that I could not tell the difference between the turkey and the ham. I’m assuming the ham was the darker meat strip, but I’m not positive on that one.

Encasing the watery cheese and mystery meat was a light, delightfully crisp crust. I really liked the crust. It was pleasantly flaky, plus it has whole grains. I’m sure that I’m supposed to have some understanding of what type of whole grains should be in my diet or how many grams I need a day but really I have no clue.

The amazing thing about this pocket is that the contents did not explode out of the pocket during the cooking process even though I had to cook the item for a considerable length of time due to the puniness of my microwave. This means that if you really want to, you can use the crisping sleeve as a carrying mechanism:

If only they made these for burritos. I’ve since warned my coworkers about the Lean Pockets. I wonder if they’ll still be in the office freezer at the end of this month.

Price: $2.00
Serving: 1 package, 3.8oz. (food) and 6.75 fluid oz. (juice drink)
Calories: 420
Fat: 20%, 13g
Sodium: 31%, 750mg
Protein: 12g
Carbs: 22%, 66g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 9

Oscar Mayer says: Lean white turkey-cured, Kraft pasteurized prepared cheddar cheese product, Ritz crackers, Skittles bite size candies, and Capri Sun Wild Cherry flavored juice drink blend from concentrate with other natural flavor.

Abi says: I like lunchmeat. I especially enjoy that super-thin sliced lunch meat that comes in those 33¢ packets at the grocery store and have names like Land-O-Frost. I detest thickly sliced lunchmeat. If I’m going to eat meat that has been stripped from an animal, cooked, and then reformed into a loaf, I’d like it to be produced in paper-thin slices. Would you eat a hunk of proscuitto? No, you would wrap the nearly see-through slices around hunks of cantaloupe and call that antipasti.

Lunchables aren’t antipasto. They also aren’t that great of a lunch. The turkey featured a variety of odd textures within each meat circle. This wouldn’t weird me out so much on Thanksgiving Day, but when I’m dealing with highly processed meats, I prefer not to find that some bits are slightly chewier than others.

The cheese was a horrific block of bright-orange plastic. Not actual plastic, but metaphorical plastic. I understand that as I get older and my palate expands, that my tastes will change. Also, I live in California now and am surrounded by places that sell crazy amounts of cheese. Today at Trader Joe’s they were sampling Vermont Cheddar and Irish Cheddar with Port and at the Milk Pail they had something with blue mold and a fresh, spreadable goat cheese. Free cheese is everywhere! And with such luxury everywhere, I feel like an idiot when I get American Cheese.

I’m sad that it is even called American Cheese. America makes some of the best cheese in the world, but we stuck our country’s name on the worst cheese ever invented. How disappointing.

The crackers were just crackers, much like a cross between off-brand Ritz and Keebler Club crackers, but with less butteriness. I have not met a cracker I didn’t like unless you count the Whole Foods store brand of Triscuits. Those things were awful and are still sitting in my cupboard. I would try to feed them to animals, but the raccoons in Stanford’s Escondido Village are already quite aggressive.

This mostly awful meal was accompanied by two wonderful items: Skittle and a Capri Sun. While I could never bring myself to purchase a box of Capri Sun (they come 10 to a box, I believe), I do find a lot of pleasure in stabbing that sometimes ineffectual little yellow straw through the foil pouch. And the Skittles? Well, you can’t really go wrong with Skittles.*

Now that I’m an adult, I understand why my mom never wanted to buy Lunchables for me or my brother. Sure, they were fun and involved miniature cold cuts, but with all of the sodium, possible chemicals, and bad cheese, she was steering me clear of a potentially distastrous palate-hindering experience.

*I originally wrote this thinking of the goodness that exists in the form of Original Skittles, Sour Skittles, and occasionally Wild Berry Skittles. However, I quickly remembered a flavor of Skittles that all but one person in my office’s cube area found completely disgusting: Carnival Flavor Skittles. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Price: $2.50
Serving: 1 meal. 7.05 oz.
Calories: 250
Fat: 20%, 13g
Sodium: 47%, 1130mg
Protein: 24gg
Carbs: 8%, 24g
Fiber: 15%, 15g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

South Beach says: South Beach Diet Wraps combine the perfect blend of ingredients - soft wraps, flavorful sauces or dressings, and natural cheeses or crunchy toppings - for a taste sensation you’ll love!

Kelly says: I am not on the South Beach diet. I am a carb lover (hello, Easten European heritage!) and I find dieting slightly freaky. I’m not talking about eating healthy. I’m talking about dieting, you know, the sort that brings to mind the Gap Girls on Saturday Night Live.

But the South Beach Diet is supposed to be nutritious and filling, satisfying even. So when I saw this adult lunchable on sale at my grocery store, I thought “Great! Now I won’t have to wait in the office microwave line!”

Ugh, I’d rather wait in line than eat this any day. The mayo alone is 40 calories. Which means that cutting out the mayo brings this meal down to 210 calories. I also did not consume the Jell-o. Even healthier, right? WRONG. I was hungry in two hours. That’s what happens when you don’t EAT anything. I felt like Chris Farley in that video, but minus David Spade and Adam Sandler as my preppy sidekicks.

Even though it does not need to be said, I will say it: South Beach Diet’s Turkey Bacon Club Wraps is not a filling lunch, though it is sort of fun to put together. There are ultra-processed turkey slices, mini wheat tortillas, and a little packet of bacon. I wish I could just buy little packs of bacon in the store. Then I could occasionally use bacon without making the whole house smell like deep fried meat.

I know, there are pouches of pre-made bacon already out there, and they aren’t even refrigerated! That weirds me out.

Bacon aside, these South Beach Diet wraps are simply Lunchables for adults but without the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup or Andes mint. Wowsers. 47% of my sodium intake for the day was in the meal 7 ounce snack.

As a college educated adult I should know better than to eat this junk.