Ben & Jerry’s Apologizes for Putting Fortune Cookies in Jeremy Lin Flavor
Since Jeremy Lin famously played college basketball at Harvard, Boston is one of the cities which can claim the New York Knicks phenom as their own. So it only made sense for the Ben & Jerry's in Boston's Harvard Square to pay homage to Lin with a limited edition Taste the Lin-Sanity flavor.
The vanilla frozen yogurt featured lychee honey swirls and pieces of fortune cookie. Can you guess which of those ingredients has kicked up a controversy?
After some customers complained that the fortune cookies were racist, Ben & Jerry's Boston has pulled them from Taste The Lin-sanity. Initially the local shop said this is because fortune cookies get soggy in frozen yogurt. (The more you know.) But eventually they posted a more traditional mea culpa on Facebook and Twitter:
On behalf of Ben & Jerry’s Boston Scoop Shops we offer a heartfelt apology if anyone was offended by our handmade Linsanity flavor that we offered at our Harvard Square location. We are proud and honored to have Jeremy Lin hail from one of our fine, local universities and we are huge sports fans. We were swept up in the nationwide Linsanity momentum. Our intention was to create a flavor to honor Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments and his meteoric rise in the NBA, and recognize that he was a local Harvard graduate. We [tried] demonstrate our commitment as a Boston-based, values-led business and if we failed in this instance we offer our sincere apologies," read the apology.
The fortune cookies have since been replaced in the flavor by more racially ambiguous but similar textured waffle cones. Do you think this is a case of political correctness run amok? Or should fortune cookies be off-limits when characterizing Asian-Americans?
[via The Los Angeles Times]