The Crabby Cook - by Jessica Harper

A few weeks ago I got an email from my bother-in-law Scott who was in a highly agitated state. He told me he had been the victim of fraud perpetrated by the Bird’s Eye Company.

It happened on a night when his (long-suffering) wife Julie was (gratefully) out of town and Scott was making himself dinner, a meal that included a package of Bird’s Eye frozen peas with pearl onions. As he pointed out to me later, the picture on the package was of a quantity of lovely green peas dotted with three pearl onions. But when Scott later prepared the peas as instructed, he found only two pearl onions present in the entire box.

Scott was understandably outraged. After spending $3.79 on a side dish one would hope to get the goods as promised per the photo that tempted you to buy the damn peas I the first place.

Scott wrote an irate email to the appropriate parties (pea control at Bird’s Eye) and received an impressively swift reply. They were devastated to hear of Scott’s issue and would make restitution. Enclosed was a coupon for $3.79 towards the purchase of future peas.

Once again, Scott saw red. He called me as I was walking down a noisy street in Manhattan but he was so heated up I could hear him over the construction of a new hotel on 44^th Street. He said (shouted) that when his friend Garry objected to the saltiness of a certain brand of peanut butter manufactured in Vermont, he had written to the company and they had sent an apology with a case of the offending product. While this might seem passive aggressive—why would he possibly want a shitload of the same stuff  that had bitched about?—Scott felt that this was a better outcome than getting a measly coupon.

“Really?” I asked. “You want them to send you a case of frozen peas with too few onions in them? How big is your freezer?”

Scott said that while he’d prefer a large sum of cash—even a small appliance would be nice–he would be satisfied with a case of peas. If Julie didn’t want a pea festival in her freezer, well, there were dogs to be fed.

I told Scott to up his Prozac, take the coupon to the store and get another package of the peas. Maybe it was an anomaly; the next package would be perfect. Just as I thought he was calm enough to execute my orders, he noticed that “The lousy coupon they gave me is NOT for this particular Bird’s Eye product, but for some other fakakta line called Steamfresh! This is very upsetting…”

In spite of his blossoming mental disorder, Scott was able to purchase another box of peas with onions, sans coupon. Those of us who love and care about him urged him to open the box ASAP to settle this thing so we could all move on to other things, like sleeping.

Here is a Video of the Box Opening.

I know that Scott appears relatively sane in the video, but that was before he realized he was blinded by abundance. I heard from him shortly after the shoot:

“I bought peas with pearl onions, not pearl onions with peas!”

Scott is now composing a letter to Bird’s Eye to demand that they get a grip on their sense of proportion. Hopefully they will send him $25,000 or, say, a lawn mower, and we can all get some peas and quiet.

Tags: birds eye product flaws, consumer complaints about vegetables, easy side dish, how to contact birds eye, pearl onions in vegetables, summer dinners, uses for peas

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2015 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Beside Myself, Cool Products, The Crabby Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.