Lean Cuisine Chicken “Chow Mein”?

I was doing some shopping in Albertsons today. Look what I found:

I wonder when chow mein turned into rice. This is just simply amazing. I already sent an email to Lean Cuisine. They replied me after 1 day.

In the email, they wrote,

“We are required by law to follow standards of definition determined by the USDA and FDA in naming our products. USDA’s definition for this product refers to a product without noodles and specifies only the amount of chicken in the sauce. ”

Really? The USDA defines a product without noodles can be called Chow Mein? But the noodles are what make it Chow Mein! As the email continued,

“We adhere to government standards because individual consumers may have different perceptions of a recipe. We will certainly forward your comment to our Marketing Department.”

What perception? I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone knows that Chow Mein has noodles. In Chinese, “chow” means “stir-fry” and “mein” means “noodles”. The entree didn’t have any noodles. It only contained rice. Therefore, the dish should be blah blah blah with rice. It is clear that Lean Cuisine made a mistake on naming the product. The name of the product was misleading. I hope that Lean Cuisine will take my opinion seriously to work with USDA and look into the naming problem.