Ben & Jerry’s loves them some punny names, and Save Our Swirled is no exception. “Oh, cute, it’s like Save Our World!” You might think when you first see the name of the ice cream.

“Oh, cute, is says SOS on the carton lip!” You continue. “Oh cute, there’s the little Ben & Jerry’s cow, wearing a sweater, standing…on a disappearing glacier in the middle of the ocean…”

At this point you read the sign the cow is holding up, which says, “If it’s melted it’s ruined!” and then you start bawling your eyes out in the frozen treats section of Target, thinking of all the polar bears and penguins and how our nation’s coastline will be underwater probably in your lifetime.

While all this is happening, other Target patrons are staring at you, probably thinking that you’re holding a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and sobbing because you’re thinking about how your boyfriend just broke up with you and you’re about to spend another night alone with the only two reliable men in your life and a Netflix queue of romantic comedies. Those people are totally sexist. Ignore them. They just don’t get it.

Drying your eyes and adding the ice cream to your cart, because depressing or not, it is a new Ben & Jerry’s flavor, you console yourself with the fact that a portion of the profits must be going towards something working to combat climate change, right?

Well…no. Not exactly. The carton urges you to go to this site to sign a petition in regards to working towards clean energy. And, to be fair, there’s a lot of information about climate change and how Ben & Jerry’s works towards being a green company.

But I feel like all those tears in the frozen food aisle would have felt more justified if I thought I was actively doing something by purchasing this flavor.

Much like the current state of our planet’s climate, Save Our Swirled sounds like a bit of a mess. The carton describes the flavor as “Raspberry Ice Cream with Marshmallow & Raspberry Swirls & Dark & White Fudge Ice Cream Cones”. Holy ampersands, Batman! I’m pretty sure my elementary school English teacher would ding me for a run-on sentence on that one. And the fact that it’s not a sentence.

Semantics aside, there are so many flavors going on here that my brain is confused, which makes me think my taste buds are going to be, also. I’m also not entirely sure what “dark & white fudge ice cream cones” means. Pieces of cone dipped in chocolate? I guess I’m going to have to dive in to find out.

It looks so innocent on the surface, but there is much hiding underneath. I’m going to have to break this down into parts.

To my surprise, the “cone” part of this didn’t involve ice cream cones at all, but instead referred to the shape of these little candies that are half dark fudge and half white. I’m sure you can understand my confusion, because we are talking about ice cream, so my brain went to waffle cones. Regardless, the little candies were tasty, and the sweetness of the white fudge nicely complimented the slight bitterness of the dark fudge.

The marshmallow swirl is all of the white stuff that you can see in the picture. I found it to be weak in both flavor and texture – all it added was a little sweetness, and it was surprisingly thin to the point of being runny, which is not at all what I would expect from something billed as “marshmallow”.

The raspberry swirl was a tasty…goo-like substance that worked well with the dark chocolate. It was rich and easily distinguishable as raspberry. I really liked the swirl, but on top of already-raspberry ice cream, it started to taste like raspberry overload.

The marshmallow swirl would have done well to step in here and break things up, but apparently it was too busy over there not tasting or acting like marshmallow at all, so it was of no help.

While I enjoyed most of Save Our Swirled’s ingredients on their own, the whole did not add up to the sum of its parts. The raspberry-on-raspberry action was too much and the marshmallow swirl was entirely underwhelming. On the plus side, the dark/white fudge “cones” added a nice change of texture and worked well with the sweetness of the other ingredients.

On the whole, I’d call Save Our Swirled a rare misstep by Ben & Jerry’s. They usually manage to take a mishmash of ingredients and make them work together, but there were some things that just didn’t work here. SOS isn’t so bad that I won’t finish the pint, but I won’t be purchasing it again, especially with all the other B&J’s more delicious options out there. Sorry, world.

Ben & Jerry’s Save Our Swirled Ice Cream

• Score: 2 out of 5 sob-inducing drowning cows
• Price: $3.00 (on sale; regular price $3.99)
• Size: 1 pint
• Purchased at: Target
• Nutritional Quirk: Nothing remotely marshmallow-sounding in the ingredients, so I’m going to blame “liquid sugar” as the marshmallow culprit.