USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

What could be more American than Pop Tarts TEAM USA Mixed Berry flavored Pop Tarts with special, Limited-Edition GO FOR THE GOLD foil packaging?

How patriotic! Pop-Tarts that are baked with Real Fruit (follow the front-label apostrophe to the bottom of the side panel where, in small print, you'll find that Real Fruit! actually means "equal to 10% fruit") and covered with red, white, and blue frosting & sprinkles.

I bet if the Olympics featured a Snacking event, America would sweep the medals.

Pop Tarts Wildlicious Flavors

Screen cap of Kellogg's Pop Tart ad

Pop Tarts has been heavily promoting the newest additions to their lineup, the "Wildllicious" flavors, which include Wild! Fruit Fusion, Wild! Strawberry, Wild! Berry, and Wild! Grape. Wild! Fruit Fusion seems to be sort of "fruit punch"-like flavor; the others are pretty much as advertised, with recognizable strawberry, raspberry, and grape flavors.

The "Wild!" part comes from the brilliantly colored frosting combinations with which the Pop Tarts are topped, not from any use of undomesticated fruit. And the actual flavors of the fillings aren't any more intense or concentrated than the standard, non-Wild! versions. So, if you enjoy Pop Tarts and want something a little more fun to chomp on, by all means go for it. Just don't expect any amazing surprises.

Toaster Pastry Heaven

Recently spotted at Big Lots: huge, 48-count boxes of Pop-Tarts!  Each of these wastebasket-sized packages contain six times the standard number of sugary, crusty frosted delights - 24 each of frosted strawberry and nutritionally-defunct Brown Sugar Cinnamon.  It's POP-TART HEAVEN!

For a long time, Brown Sugar Cinnamon was my favorite variety of Pop-Tart.  While it's true that no Pop-Tart is exactly the epitome of healthy eating, Brown Sugar Cinnamon is almost the perfect storm of empty calories. There isn't even the pretense of fruit there to make Mom feel less guilty about abandoning breakfast to The Big K. It's kind of like the Pop-Tart development team said, "You know what? The hell with it! Skip the fruit jam and let's just fill some of 'em up with sugar! That's what the little bastards really want anyway. And put frosting on it, too."

They were right. When I was a little bastard, I LOVED Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts, and my cruel heartless mother would hardly ever buy them. (I think she said something like, "You're not getting that shit for breakfast.")

New Pop-Tart Varieties

Three new varieties of Pop-Tarts caught my daughter's eye recently. She bought a box of each and we did some tasting. Not all at once, though - the days when I could stand to eat that many Pop-Tarts in one sitting are long gone.

Vanilla Milkshake - I can't figure out what is supposed to be "milkshakey" about this flavor; it's got white frosting with embedded rainbow sprinkles, and it seems to be filled with some kind of vanilla frosting (very creamy in texture, almost drips out when the Pop-Tart is broken open or pulled apart.) Quite delicious vanilla flavor, but nothing obviously "milky" about the taste at all. Perhaps it's because of all the whiteness? Or maybe it's the calcium. Calcium. Why does Kellogg's keep trying to convince everyone that their oversweetened yet delicious piles of empty calories are good for you? It must be a callous marketing ploy. (I know that it can't possibly be anything resembling a "conscience" because large corporations are soulless rat bastards that would happily make baby food out of vivisected puppies and kittens if they could get away with it and were it profitable.) Anyway, thumbs up for the vanilla, they're yummy.

Another strong "thumbs up" goes to the Dulce de Leche, a "Limited Edition" flavor that I have not seen in the mainstream supermarkets around here, but was able to find easily in the nerby city markets catering to Hispanic customers. This has quickly become my daughter's favorite flavor; the rich caramel filling with the little squiggles of brown sugar frosting won her over immediately.

The third and final variety, Guava-Mango, is another "Limited Edition" flavor that we were only able to find at the Hispanic supermarkets. These are tasty, but not quite as successful as the other two - the flavor had no distinct guava or mango notes, but managed to taste more like Hawaiian Punch Fruit Punch than any exotic fruit blend. It tasted a lot like the regular strawberry Pop-Tarts, only less sweet and with a lot less frosting. They were okay, just not something to go out of the way for.

Kellogg's Jump Starts Breakfast

Kids sure do love sugar, don't they? If you gave them Snickers bars and root beer for breakfast every day, you would be T3H COOLEST PARENT EVAR and every one of your kid's friends would cry themselves to sleep at night because you're not their parent, too. The trouble is, the local PTO would be picketing your house and some busybody neighbor would be following you around with a camera and telephoto lens gathering "evidence" against you for your state's Child Protective Services agency.

Lucky for you that Kellogg's came up with these amazing breakfast-in-a-box Jump-Starts things! Jump-Starts are packed with all the sweetness your little sugarfiend could ask for; Kellogg's has given you a socially acceptable way to feed your kids candy for breakfast by carefully disguising it as actual food.

I found a bunch of these at Big Lots! the other day for a dollar a piece (a little better than half off their supermarket price) so my daughter and I decided to try them. Inside, we found a one-ounce container of "reduced sugar" Frosted Flakes, a single Frosted Blueberry Pop-Tart, and a 4.23-ounce juicebox containing apple juice (clearly, this is not a breakfast kit for people following a low-carb diet.) There was also a napkin and spoon. We had to provide our own milk for the cereal - I guess Kellogg's can't be bothered to pack a small no-refrigeration-needed TetraPak of milk in the kit.

Everything in the package was fresh and, I have to admit, delicious. I loved Frosted Flakes when I was a kid and I found nothing wrong with this "reduced sugar" version (couldn't even tell the difference as a matter of fact.) Same goes for the Pop Tarts, even though the Mylar packaging still has that stupid "good source of vitamins and minerals" tag on it. Even the apple juice wasn't that bad. Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts are every bit as tasty and fun today as they were forty years ago.

I'm really torn about these Jump Starts. On the one hand, I really like Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts, and I think it's pretty cool that they package these small quantities. My mom would have loved single-wrapped Pop-Tarts - there would have been no second pastry left behind in the box to get soft in the summer humidity while it was waiting for a kid to eat it. And those little cups of Frosted Flakes are the perfect size for a quick snack when it's three hours to supper and you just want a quick munch to take the edge off.

On the other hand, I really don't think it's that great an idea to package up so much sugar into one meal kit designed to be eaten at one sitting. Remember how Pop-Tarts had been marketed as an after-school snack for so many years? Kellogg's is basically bundling up snack items and pushing them as breakfast - and trying to weasel people into thinking it's healthy by cutting out a bit of sugar and labelling the cereal as "reduced sugar."

I'm probably not going to buy these again - I'm not really in the demographic for them anyway - but if I had kids I'd probably pick up a bunch of them and break them down into components for rationing out over the course of a week or so. A kid will still get a kick out of eating cereal from one of those disposable bowls, and I could pair that 1-ounce serving with some toast and peanut butter, saving the Pop-Tart for an after-school snack with a glass of milk. Far better to use them that way than to just let the kid gorge on all that processed sugar and high-fructose corn syrup all at once.

One final note about this "reduced sugar" nonsense (from The Washington Times):

Nutrition scientists who reviewed the lower-sugar versions of six major brands of sweetened cereals at the request of the Associated Press found they have no significant nutritional advantages over their full-sugar counterparts.

The scientists from five universities found that although the new cereals do have less sugar, the calories, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and other nutrients are almost identical to the full-sugar cereals.

"You're supposed to think it's healthy," said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of a book critical of the food industry's influence on public health. "This is about marketing. It is about nothing else. It is not about kids' health."

Blame the calorie woes on crunch. To preserve cereals' taste and texture, sugar is replaced with other carbohydrates that have the same calories as sugar and are no better nutritionally.

Links:
Kellogg's website
Ingredients and Nutritional Information for Frosted Flakes Jump-Starts

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Healthy Snacks

I was browsing the selection in the vending machine at work when this tag on one of the snacks caught my eye:

Pretty impressive. This stuff isn't just any old source of a couple vitamins or minerals, but a good source. Of seven - count 'em - seven vitamins and minerals. Check it out:

Healthy stuff indeed, with all those B-vitamins and whatnot. Pity they couldn't have snuck some Vitamin C and calcium in there to round things out, eh?

So, what is this miracle food you ask?

Kellog's Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts.

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Pop Tarts Splitz

I was born in 1960, and I can not remember a time without Pop-Tarts. When I was a kid, my mom always seemed to have a box on hand in the cupboard. They were an occasional treat, usually served up with a glass of milk for an after-school snack; Mom used to buy the ones filled with strawberry or blueberry jam though I'm pretty sure that more kinds of fruit-preserve filling were available.

When I was in high school, I discovered that Kelloggs was making a "Brown Sugar/Cinnamon" flavor, and it soon became my favorite. There was a layer of moist, cinnamon-adulterated brown sugar filling sandwiched between two layers of short pastry crust, topped with a hard shell of brown-colored confectioner's glaze. They were delicious, and completely devoid of any kind of nutritional value whatsoever - Brown Sugar/Cinnamon Pop-Tarts defined the phrase "empty calories" even better than alcohol.

I have the feeling that over the years, the hypersweet junkfood Pop-Tarts have been better sellers than the [not really] healthy fruit-filled ones. I never seem to see new fruity varieties get introduced, but I've noticed plenty of the "empty calorie" variety ones come and go. Like, for example, this one: Pop-Tarts Splitz, with chocolate filling and frosting on one side, and vanilla frosting and filling on the inside.

Now, if you don't like Pop-Tarts to begin with, nothing I write here is going to change your mind about them. The basic flavors in Pop-Tarts haven't changed all that much since I was a kid, and with the exception of the fillings, there isn't anything different about these. The pastry crust is still pretty industrial, kind of flaky/crumbly, with a quite pleasant shortbread note to it. The frosting is still that hardened confectioner's-glaze style stuff that reminds me of hardened royal icing.

There aren't any real surprises inside, either. The chocolate side tastes like sweetened cocoa and the vanilla side like artificially-flavored vanilla cake frosting. There's no fruit, no "healthy bits," nothing at all here to redeem them to parents concerned about their childrens' intake of lowest-common-denominator crap. They're just like the Brown-Sugar/Cinnamon Pop-Tarts of my youth, updated with fresh new carbohydrate overload, and with a frosting pattern on top that resembles tire tracks on a snowy road. Pretty awesome all the way around, I think.

Pop-Tarts has their own website at www.poptarts.com. Be advised if you go there, it's kind of clunky and top-heavy with animations and stuff, and they also tell you that you can't access some of the content without shutting off your pop-up blocker. Pretty funny, huh?

French Toast Pop Tarts

My favorite PopTarts variety has always been Brown Sugar Cinnamon. Cheap pastry crust with hard fondant frosting on the outside and some kind of moist brown sugar goo inside. A perfect food, if you define perfect as "completely lacking in nutritional value."

So imagine my thoughts upon seeing French Toast PopTarts for the first time. Cheap pastry crust with "rich syrupy filling"?? Could Kellogg's actually be producing a food with a greater number of empty calories than my old favorite Brown Sugar Cinnamon?

Well, the short answer is "no." The Empty Calorie count is no higher for French Toast than Brown Sugar Cinnamon. But the good news is that there aren't any less, either.

The top crust of these toaster pastries has an interestingly textured surface, perhaps designed to resemble French toast. There is no frosting, but the top is dotted with powdery spots of cinnamon. And the aroma! A rich, buttery aroma redolent with mapley syrupy goodness, beckoning to the taste buds.

As trite as it may be, I find it impossible to describe these without using the word "delicious." The cheap crust is flaky and delicate, with just the right backflavor of egg nog - just as you'd expect from something labeled "French toast." The filling is a slightly wetter variety of the brown sugar type, but with a wonderful maple flavor that - even though I know it to be artificial - tastes authentic.

They were so good, the family and I each had one for dessert last night.

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