Test your knowledge of convenience food: Of course you know that Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts come two to a packet, but suppose you choose to eat only one. Admittedly, this is an unlikely scenario because, as comedian Paula Pound-stone is fond of pointing out in her stand-up routine, after the packet is open, it seems illogical to leave half of it uneaten. But for the sake of argument, let us hypothesize that you are on a diet and you are forced to limit your intake to only one 200-calorie toaster pastry—which, according to the Nutrition Information area on the side of the box, is in fact a single serving. What do you call it?
If you said “a Pop-Tart,” you are wrong. According to Kellogg, which conceptualized toaster pastries and introduced them to the world in 1964 (originally as Country Squares), even a single slab of the number-one heat-and-eat table tile is properly referred to as a Pop-Tarts. The s on the end not only confirms Paula Poundstone’s craving to eat them in multiples; it also suggests the profusion of Pop-Tarts among America’s daily rations.
Pop-Tarts aren’t merely very popular; they have become a paramount symbol of corporate creativity—an ingenious method for harried eaters to ingest warm, complex foodstuff almost instantly and without exertion. Plucked from a foil packet in a cardboard box on an unrefrigerated pantry shelf, they need only a few minutes in a toaster to become something that resembles freshly baked food!
We asked Kellogg to tell us who exactly eats them, and their creator responded (and we quote): “Everyone in the country.” A nice person in the department of Corporate Communications advised us that the age range of Pop-Tarts eaters was between two and thirty-five, but that most people who eat them are between six and seventeen. The bigger the family (3+ kids), the more likely it is that Pop-Tarts will be a regular staple. At one point, the My Three Sons television family were Pop-Tarts spokespeople.
Eighty percent of all Pop-Tarts are eaten warm; in fact, “warmth” is one of the top three reasons people like them (“taste” and “convenience” are the other two). Although nobody mentioned it in the Kellogg surveys to which we were privy, one of the truly remarkable qualities of Pop-Tarts is the way they feel: They are substantial pieces of food, denser and heftier than any pastry you would find in a bakery, and whether they are cold or toasted, fresh from the foil packet or abandoned on the kitchen counter days before, they are relentlessly crisp. A Pop-Tarts’s shelf life (in the box) is six to nine months, depending on whether or not it is a fruited variety. No matter how you treat it, it always feels ready to eat; and it is so wieldy that most people don’t bother putting it on a plate. The only thing capable of killing a Pop-Tarts is a microwave oven. People too impatient to wait the full two minutes required in a toaster oven wind up with a hideous clump of sodden, fissured dough engulfed by sticky globules of corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, dextrose, gelatin, and xanthan gum it once encased.