Day 12 - Flavored Pops

I am the proud new owner of 100 flavored ice pops. Not because I really need that many, but because I spotted something stupid on the box label, and then something else, and by the third stupid thing I was already calculating whether I had enough change in my wallet to bring this treasure trove home with me.

The first thing that caught my eye was that they were pasteurized. I did a mental rundown of the ingredients. Water, sugar, flavor, color. Nope...no milk or eggs. However, since my English degree leaves me qualified in very few of the science disciplines, I started to concede that maybe this makes sense to someone when I noticed that beneath “Naturally and Artificially Flavored” it proclaimed “A Quiescently Frozen Confection.” Something my English degree does qualify me in is words, and I had no idea what 'quiescently' meant. I was also fairly certain that the majority of people purchasing flavored liquid in a tube were in the dark as well. So I looked it up. It means that the liquid is not agitated during the freezing process. Since these 'confections' are sold not in the freezer section, but rather on a shelf, I think they'll have a tough time backing that claim up. Once they are in the privacy of my own freezer, I feel entitled to agitate them all I want. More importantly, of the three things they felt were most important to convey about their product, two of them confused the hell out of me.

Next, I noticed that there were 100 pops, and each pop was one ounce, or 28.3 grams, and that the net weight was six pounds four ounces, or 2.8 kilograms. This seems like an excessive amount of weight information. Do I really need to know five different ways to express how much stuff is in this box? In contrast, before a list of six flavors was a disclaimer. “May or may not contain the following flavors”. So it may not contain any of those flavors? Why did they stop at six? I mean, if they were really trying to sell it, list 20 or 30 flavors that may not be in the box. And flavor content seems like much more vital information than unit conversion. In fact, of all of the information on this box, what flavors I am buying stands out as the most important component in my purchasing decision. Instead, they provide me with an overabundance of weight calculations, and confusing product attributes. Of course, I did buy the box. Now who's stupid?