Ben & Jerry's Potentially Racist Flavor, "Lin-Sanity"

It was inevitable that noted ice cream purveyors and pun lovers Ben & Jerry's would decide to celebrate New York Knicks point guard, Harvard grad, and overnight sensation Jeremy Lin with a new flavor. Unfortunately, the hastily rendered "Taste the Lin-Sanity" has caught heat for both racial insensitivity and faulty execution.

The flavor debuted as a limited-edition offering exclusive to the Harvard Square Ben & Jerry's shop, featuring vanilla frozen yogurt, lychee honey swirls, and crushed fortune cookie pieces. As tasty as the combination might sound, the idea of reducing Lin to a pint of lychee and fortune cookies struck many consumers and Internet commenters as shockingly racist, and the cookies didn't even maintain their crunch when submerged in ice cream.

"There seemed to be a bit of an initial backlash about it, but we obviously weren't looking to offend anybody and the majority of the feedback about it has been positive," Ryan Midden, Ben & Jerry's general manager for Boston and Cambridge, told The Boston Globe.

The flavor has since been edited and no longer includes fortune cookie pieces, which Midden said is primarily because some pints were returned "because the cookies got so soggy." The new iteration is a vanilla frozen yogurt with lychee-honey swirls that comes with a fresh waffle cookie on the side, which can be dipped into the ice cream or crumbled on top.