Packages plastered with fruit bouquets and boasting fruit juices and purees give this category an aura of virtue that other candies can only envy. The problem is that the wholesome fruit goodness of fruit snacks is wholly imaginary. Fruit snacks are not fruit. They're not better than candy. They are candy.

So I want to be first in line to cheer for the plaintiff in the latest salvo in the food wars: a class-action suit against General Mills targeting its line of Betty Crocker-branded fruit snack products, including Fruit Roll Ups, Fruit by the Foot, Fruit Gushers, and Fruit Shapes.

The complaint (PDF), filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California on October 14, alleges that General Mills "is conveying an overall message of a healthful snack product to parents when, in fact, the products contain dangerous, non-nutritious, unhealthy partially hydrogenated oil, large amounts of sugar, and potentially harmful artificial dyes." The suit accuses General Mills of using misleading packaging and marketing in order to "deceptively convey the message that its products are nutritious and healthful."

The specific Fruit Snacks named in this complaint are a pretty easy target, at least in the court of public opinion. One wonders what convoluted reasoning lawyers might deploy to mount a defense of a product like Strawberry Fruit Roll-Up, whose ingredients list omits strawberries entirely, and rapidly devolves from "Pears from Concentrate" (aka sugar) to "Corn Syrup, Dried Corn Syrup, Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil, Citric Acid, Acetylated Monoglycerides, Fruit Pectin, Dextrose, Malic Acid, Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), Natural Flavor, Color (red 40, yellows 5 & 6, blue 1)."

But Fruit Snacks are really the tip of a powerful wedge. Behind this lawsuit is the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the biggest consumer advocacy group for all matters nutritional. The complaint sets the groundwork for a wider argument with much higher stakes: When junky food promotes selective nutritional claims like "low fat," "gluten free," "high fiber," or "100% of the daily allowance on Vitamin C," the message is that the food is healthful and nutritious. Even if the product claims taken singly are true, the lawsuit aims to prove that the packaging and marketing is essentially deceptive: candy dressed up and sold as fruit. Read this suit more broadly and it is clear that CSPI is going after the marketing practices of the entire packaged food industry.

These days, it's hard to find a product in the grocery store that doesn't boast some nutritional benefit. But as processed food critics have been saying for a long time, all that virtue paraded on the front of the package is given the lie by the fine print on the "Nutrition Facts" label. A recent study by the Prevention Institute looked at a basket of processed foods featuring front-of-package "healthy" labeling. Prognosis: negative. Forty-nine out of 58 of the foods targeted in the study failed to live up to at least one of the criteria for healthy food established in the federal government's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans." We're talking Campbell's Tomato Soup, Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter, Rice Krispies. And we're also talking added sugar, refined grains, sodium like a salt lick. If Fruit Snacks' failure to disclose its dangerous and unwholesome side is fraudulent, as CSPI alleges, then all those boxed, bagged, and frozen foods that allude to their healthy virtues are engaged in the same fraud.