"Let's be fair and evaluate these purely on taste," I said to my wife as she reached for a chicken nugget dusted with a suspiciously yellow nacho "cheese" powder.

She bit into the Oscar Mayer Lunchables "Nacho Cheese Chicken Shake-Up" and chewed once before spitting it into her hand. "Gross." Which about summed up the experiment.

Granted, my family isn't the target demographic for Lunchables, a line of packaged kids meals aimed at sparing parents from having to make junior's lunch. We use organic window cleaner, which should tell you something about what we actually put in our mouths.

And that approach is amplified for our 2-year-old son, who gobbles free-range sushi and wild-caught hummus, has never eaten fast food and thinks "cookies" are the vegetable-studded whole wheat biscuits I bake for him.

So until today, I'd never bought a Lunchable. To me, they rate below crack and just above polonium-210. But is that fair?

A few years ago, as national attention finally focused on childhood obesity in earnest, the Lunchables line was overhauled, or "healthed up" in industry parlance. They'd taken a few hits for their less-than-stellar nutritionals.

I was dubious, but never got around to checking into it. Until I was grocery shopping with my son recently and saw the wall of brightly colored boxes. Because nothing says wholesome like "Mess with Your Mouth Pizza."

I felt embarrassed in the checkout line. I wanted to assure the teenager ringing us up that the six Lunchables in my cart were for business only.

Once our son was down for his nap, my wife and I opened the boxes and followed the assembly instructions for each.

For example: "Pour sour tongue teasing fizz packet into sauce." That was part of the "Mess with Your Mouth Pizza." Because when I think good pizza, I think ground up Pop Rocks.

"Why? Why would you want fizz on your pizza?" my wife asked as she poured pink, green and yellow powdery crystals over her portion. That was followed by a quick, "Ick!" as she again spit out her sample.

There was nothing to like. The "crust" tasted of soggy cardboard. The sauce — ditto for the sauce in the "Maxed Out Pizza Stix" — tasted like corn syrup spiked with oregano. The cheese, blessedly, had no flavor.

The fizz powder? Freakish and wrong beyond reckoning.

The "Maxed Out Double Stacked Tacos" were less offensive. But the 2 1/2 tablespoons of chicken were undetectable in the taco shell and tortilla. The cheese and anemic salsa added nothing. It might as well have been a mouth of Wonder Bread.

All I'll add regarding the "Nacho Cheese Chicken Shake-Ups" (which are basically chicken nuggets) — they resemble what you see on the ground when a bird's egg falls out of the nest, but with the taste and consistency of pencil erasers.

The best were the "Bologna and American Stackers" and "Cracker Combo Ham and Cheddar," both essentially cheese, crackers and meat that you — ready? — stack. And by "best" I mean they weren't horrendous.

OK, so we needed to switch our suspension of disbelief and pretend these things are delicious. My imagination actually isn't that strong, but we went with it. Now would we let our son eat them? Especially since the healthy makeover?

After all, three of my Lunchables were "Sensible Solutions," which means they boast of nutritional pluses. Wonder if the "To protect your teeth, only eat Sour Extinguisher candies at room temperature" warning on the tacos was factored into that.

Let's start with the calories. Not horrendous. Most hover in the 400s, not totally unreasonable for an active child. And most of the meals I tasted kept the fat to under 30 percent of those calories, the federal guideline for school lunches.

The exception was the "Bologna and American Stackers," which came in at a 37 percent. Types of fat also were a concern. Of that fat in the stackers, 9 grams was saturated. Same for the ham and Cheddar cracker meal.

Whole grains? What are those? Fiber is sorely missing from these foods. Some had 2 grams. Others had none, or less than 1 gram. You mean you can't cram a little whole wheat into a pizza crust? It certainly couldn't hurt the flavor.

But don't worry, there is plenty of sugar. The tacos have 24 grams. The pizza has 39 grams, while the stackers get 43 grams and the pizza stix get a whopping 72 grams. The nuggets get off easy with just 16 grams.

But if you really want to blow your mind, look at the sodium. Keep in mind that the federal government says adults should aim for no more than 2,300 milligrams a day, and that plenty of health officials consider even that way too high.

The tacos come in at 840 milligrams, while the pizza has 630, the bologna stackers have 820, the nuggets have just 560, the pizza "stix" get a hefty 1,440, and — drum roll, please — the ham and Cheddar crackers get 1,620.

So to answer my question, I'll leave you with my wife's final thought.

"My main objection was cost and nutrition. I'm glad to see they taste bad, too."

___

asap columnist J.M. Hirsch covers food, diet and nutrition for the AP. E-mail him at jhirschap.org.

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