Tart of This Complete Breakfast

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

One evening recently when I had not yet fallen asleep on my sofa, I was surfing the web when I stumbled onto an almost unbelievable statistic.

Kellogg’s sold 3 billion Pop-Tarts in 2022. That’s right, 3 BILLION. In a single year!

To do the math, that’s one-and-a-half Pop-Tarts for every child on Earth aged 14 and under. And, of course, it’s not just kids who consume Pop-Tarts. Adults eat them, too. (Except for my wife, Amy. She’s awesome, but she’s not perfect.)

This got me thinking about the famous toaster pastry. So, I ate one. It was then I realized that when it comes to Pop-Tarts there’s a lot to consider.

A miracle of science and marketing

Pop-Tarts are a marvel. Baked goods so loaded with preservatives that they last for months when kept in their foil wrappers.

How is this possible? It’s a miracle of science!

What’s more, while Pop-Tarts are usually first discovered and consumed in childhood, many of us continue eating them across our lifespans. And we never stop.

Oh, sure, we may eat fewer as we age. But we still eat them, either as a guilty pleasure or as a substitute for something else we would rather—or should—eat instead. Whether it’s fruit or vegetables or some other altogether inferior food.

Pop-Tarts were something else entirely

In the television commercials of my childhood, sugary cereals were always touted as being “part of this complete breakfast.” A picture of said complete breakfast would be shown near the end of the ad. It always included a bowl of cereal, a slice of buttered toast, glasses of milk and orange juice, and a serving of fruit.

We ate well in my house, but I recall few breakfasts being that “complete.” Perhaps we had a cut-up banana in the cereal or there might have been a burnt piece of toast or a recycled jelly jar of made-from-concentrate orange juice. But that commercial smorgasbord never materialized.

The difference wasn’t just the food. It was the presentation. The immaculate placemat. The pat of butter, square and soft at the edges. The milk, sitting chilled and expectantly in a glass, waiting to be poured over the cereal.

No, my breakfasts never looked like that.

In memory, Pop-Tarts were assumed to be “part of this complete breakfast,” too, but I haven’t found a vintage commercial that confirms this.

Pop-Tarts, alas, were something else.

The “part of this complete breakfast” line was created by Kellogg’s in the last century to encourage Americans to eat cereal for breakfast.

It proved to be a brilliant slogan. While acknowledging that cereal wasn’t, strictly speaking, a nutritious substitute for other breakfast staples (over the years Americans have eaten some odd things for breakfast) it also suggested that no breakfast would be “complete” without cereal. No wonder the slogan endured for decades.

So, where does that leave Pop-Tarts? And what are they, exactly?

Big questions demand answers

Pop-Tarts are having a moment. A big reason is the much-hyped Jerry Seinfeld film, Unfrosted, which debuted on Netflix in May.

Unfrosted is a fun, if silly production filled with A-list stand-up comedians and frosted with a generous slathering of space-age nostalgia. It’s worth a watch, even if only to snack on a few laughs and to see Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer, both of whom are terrific in their roles.

Seinfeld has built a billion-dollar career on making something funny out of nothing. In the case of Unfrosted, the “nothing” is the birth of Pop-Tarts in the sixties. The corporate intrigue, real or imagined, that surrounded bringing Pop-Tarts to market isn’t, in the end, all that interesting. That Kellogg’s and its major rival Post duked it out to be the first to develop a ubiquitous toaster pastry is infinitesimally less important than the product itself.

Indeed, Pop-Tarts went on to become a breakfast aisle staple for six decades running. And while one might be curious about the product’s origin story, bigger questions demand answers.

How can a “pastry” stay edible for up to a year?

How can the fruit filling, frosting, and pastry all arrive at just the right temperature after a few minutes in a toaster?

Why does Kellogg’s feel the need to keep introducing new Pop-Tarts flavors?

And why do so many of these newly introduced flavors suck?

These are all BIG questions. At least the ones I wonder about.

There MUST be something wrong with you

Not long ago, I asked my Facebook friends to name their favorite Pop-Tarts flavor. I received a veritable variety pack of answers—strawberry, chocolate, brown sugar & cinnamon, among others. But what surprised me was the certainty, if not evangelistic zeal with which their answers were offered. There was even a sub-debate over frosting.

Many of the responses went something like, “This is THE best flavor of Pop-Tarts. And this answer is NOT open to debate. And if you don’t agree with me, there MUST be something WRONG with you.” Or, “What kind of HEATHEN eats an unfrosted Pop-Tart?”

It was as if I had asked a question about politics. And I’m sure some of my Facebook friends would argue that I did.

While most of these strong preferences were anchored in childhood memory, my own favorite Pop-Tarts flavor isn’t one from my formative years.

My hands-down favorite? Pumpkin Pie, which is only available during the unofficial “pumpkin season” that begins around Labor Day and extends through Thanksgiving. Sadly, some years Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts aren’t available at all (they were nowhere to be found on store shelves in 2022).

Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts contain a sweet, delicious filling evocative of pumpkin pie. The white frosting is accented with orange and yellow sprinkles, confirming that this variety of Pop-Tarts is part of a complete autumn breakfast.

Of course, the pumpkin spice craze didn’t exist when I was a kid in the seventies. But I loved the pumpkin pies my mom baked every fall. Except for the pies she occasionally made with fresh pumpkin instead of the highly and uniformly processed Libby’s canned pumpkin. The pies made with fresh pumpkin tasted like spiced squash with a hint of mustiness.

If a musty pie sounds gross to you, I won’t try to convince you otherwise. But I’m happy to try to sway you to jump on the Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts bandwagon.

How Pop-Tarts stack up against the competition

Though you’ll find them shelved alongside breakfast cereal in the supermarket, Pop-Tarts are eaten pretty much any hour of the day or night. But let’s address the elephant in the room: Are Pop-Tarts a good breakfast food? Or, in other words, are Pop-Tarts really worthy of being part of a complete breakfast?

Using a robust range of criteria, let’s compare a serving of Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts (2 pastries) with another breakfast option, Trader Joe’s Organic Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal (1 packet).

Calories Per Serving

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: 150
Pop-Tarts: 370
Advantage: Oatmeal

Total Fat

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: 2 grams
Pop-Tarts: 9 grams
Advantage: Oatmeal

Total Sugars

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: 11 grams
Pop-Tarts: 30 grams
Advantage: Oatmeal

Daily Allowance of Nutrients

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: Vitamin D (N/A), Iron (6%), Thiamin (N/A), Niacin (N/A)
Pop-Tarts: Vitamin D (0%), Iron (8%), Thiamin (4%), Niacin (10%)
Advantage: Beats me.

Questionable Ingredients

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: organic dehydrated cane juice solids
Pop-Tarts: high fructose corn syrup, soybean and palm oil, xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carnauba wax
Advantage: Oatmeal

Taste

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: Healthy but sad.
Pop-Tarts: Delicious!
Advantage: Pop-Tarts

Convenience

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: Must add 2/3 cup of water, heat, and stir.
Pop-Tarts: Unwrap and eat, no water required. Toasting optional. (It depends on who you ask, however. Amy compares eating untoasted Pop-Tarts to eating raw meat. I won’t disagree, even though I eat untoasted Pop-Tarts all the time.)
Advantage: Pop-Tarts

Shelf Life if Unopened

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: Up to 2 years
Pop-Tarts: 6 to 12 months
Advantage: Oatmeal. But, seriously, why would you keep something on your shelf for 2 years that you don’t really want to eat?

Variety (Available Options)

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: 1
Pop-Tarts: At least 24
Advantage: Pop-Tarts

Fun

Oats & Flax Instant Oatmeal: Not at all.
Pop-Tarts: Definitely!
Advantage: Pop-Tarts

Even though oatmeal and Pop-Tarts each win multiple categories, we can all agree that Pop-Tarts emerge as the undisputed winner.

The most powerless time in our lives

We tend to look back on childhood as if it was the one time in our difficult lives when we didn’t have a care in the world.

This is, of course, hogwash.

Even those of us who had relatively trauma-free childhoods had worries, and we all experienced pressure and faced the constant specter of being laughed at, humiliated, or bullied. Often, we felt excluded and we didn’t have the social skills to navigate childhood cliques.

We also didn’t grasp that the world wouldn’t really end if we had a falling out with our best friend, weren’t invited to a birthday party, or weren’t picked for a Little League team. We lacked the perspective to understand that while part of our world would end, something else would rise in its place. It might not be as good as what it replaced, but life would go on regardless.

As adults, many of us have learned the best way to manage stress is to DO SOMETHING about the thing that is stressing us out. If it’s job-related, we work harder or find another job. Stressed about our weight? We eat better and exercise. When we experience a crisis, we seek out and spend time with supportive people. If money is the culprit, we figure out how to make or save more of it.

But as children, even if we fully grasped the root cause of our stress, we had fewer options for coping. Those taking care of us controlled all the resources. Money. Social connections. Time. Diet. Physical surroundings. They were all beyond our control.

As children, even though we didn’t have nearly as much pressure on us as we do now, we were also basically powerless.

Especially when it came to eating “breakfast” foods for lunch, dinner, or as a midnight snack.

Reconsidering our childhood diets

We carry childhood memories into adulthood. Not so much our childhood diets. Few grown-ups dine on Lunchables or Go-Gurt or Looney Tunes Frozen Meals or Mr. T cereal or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pies.

But many adults I know still eat macaroni and cheese and chicken strips and Campbell’s Tomato Soup with their grilled cheese sandwiches.

Pop-Tarts fall into this category, too. However, I suspect many more adults consume Pop-Tarts than readily admit to it.

My theory is that we adults like to believe we eat healthier than we do. It’s much the same as how people, when polled, insist they attend church regularly, volunteer, or give to charity even though they don’t do any of these socially positive things.

We don’t always eat our vegetables. We don’t drink eight glasses of water per day. We don’t exercise regularly or get enough sleep every night. At a convenience store, we don’t grab the apple or banana instead of the king size package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

And upon weighing our options at a vending machine, we choose the package of Pop-Tarts instead of the granola bar. Unless we instead go for the cheese Danish or the sleeve of mini donuts.

A lesser baked good?

We live in an era in which baking is surging in popularity. The Great British Baking Show and the lesser American programs have hit a sweet spot (if you will) in our psyche. People are into baking and consuming baked goods.

At the height of the pandemic, when people could have taken up almost any hobby, be it coin collecting, building tiny ships in bottles, or riding unicycles, a great many chose to learn to bake, whether it was elaborate desserts or sourdough bread.

More than a few of these people decided to turn their baking hobbies into small businesses. Specialty baking shops peddling brownies, scones, breads, and cupcakes seem to be everywhere now. But this wasn’t always the case.

In the town where I grew up, there wasn’t a bakery save for the one in the local Kroger. I was led to believe that bakeries were only found in big cities. Especially as no one I knew seemed willing to pay a premium price for quality baked goods when they could “get the same thing for less at the Walmart.”

So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that an honest-to-goodness bakery has opened in a tiny town less than 15 miles from my hometown. I wish them well.

My point here is that we now have greater knowledge of and access to quality baked goods. And yet—AND YET—we still buy and consume Pop-Tarts at a brisk if not alarming rate.

We know good cakes, pies, Danish, croissants, muffins, and cookies. And, of course, we also understand that the better the baked good the shorter its shelf life.

By this standard, Pop-Tarts aren’t good. But they last and are remarkably consistent. Right out of the pack, you won’t ever encounter a strawberry Pop-Tart with uneven edges or too little or too much frosting. With a Pop-Tart, for better or worse, you know exactly what you are getting.

And you get it every single time.

Never satisfied

Why do I eat Pop-Tarts? Honestly, I’m not sure. Over a month, I might eat a box of 12. Some months I eat fewer. Or none at all.

At Amy’s prodding, I’ll sometimes open a package of two but only eat one. This is probably a good idea. And, interestingly, the orphaned pastry left in the open wrapper and stashed back in the box never tastes staler when I return to it days later.

When I do eat a Pop-Tart (or two), it never exactly satisfies me. My complete breakfast never seems to be less complete if I just stick to cereal or toast with a cup of coffee or a small glass of orange juice.

Still, I regularly buy and eat Pop-Tarts. And soon enough I’ll dutifully go in search of the Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts at my local grocery store.

When I find them, it will be a good day to be me.