On my flight back from Denver on United, I bought one of the airline’s $5 snack packs, this one called the “mini-meal.” It sounded sort of healthy—applesauce, crackers, cheese and salami plus other munchies. Intrepid reporter – or classic female calorie-counter, you choose – that I am, I decided to take a closer look at the numbers. Wow. Everything was in little individual serving packages. Of the six items, only four were labeled with nutrition information, so I took notes on the other two and looked them up at their company Web sites online when I got home. Total calorie count for my mini-meal was 570 calories. Total fat was 35.2 grams – that means that just over 55 percent of the calories came from fat. Total saturated fat was 13 grams. Trying to figure out what qualified it as a “mini-meal,” I saw that it was sort of picnic fare—at least the salami, cheese, and crackers. Plus the applesauce was, I guess, an apple substitute, and being Mott’s Healthy Harvest it was only 50 calories with no fat, so no worse than a real apple. The two-pack of Milano cookies was dessert. Why there was a packet of potato chips, I don’t know, and the chips were the single worst offender for calories, with 150. The salami had the most fat, 10 grams—in fact, 82 percent of the salami calories came from fat. If I’d been watching my fat and calories, as I should have been, really the only things I should have eaten would have been the applesauce and the crackers (60 calories, 1.2 grams of fat, no saturated fat). Next best thing, calorie-wise, was the Rondele Peppercorn Parmesan 1-oz. cheese spread, at 80 calories/8 fat grams; fat-wise, next lowest was the cookies , with 7 grams of fat (and 120 calories). But for five bucks, and with nothing much else to do, of course I ate it all. Although I must have burned off a few calories taking all those notes. -Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer