It is Friday the Thirteenth, Corona Virus is in full effect, and that, of course, means people are in panic-mode at the grocery stores. Things are flying off the shelf left and right, but there’s one thing that isn’t.
Fruit Loop Pop-Tarts.
Yes, I know you already guessed that, astute reader. And yes, while everyone was cleaning out the bread, toilet paper, and plant-based meats — real bummer for me on that last one, but good on you, society — I made a quick stop at the “weird stuff at the end of aisle 7” and picked up my latest bit of self-masochism.
Question 1: Is it good?
This is the obvious question and I’ll try to get it out of the way as quick as I can so we can move on to more interesting topics: Maybe?
I actually have no idea if these things are good, or bad, or if they transcend our primitive understanding of taste all together.
Question 2: What is the best way to experience them?
This isn’t a question of “toasted or un-toasted” so much as it’s a question of, what is the correct way to eat these? My tastebuds tell me to pair Fruit Loops with Milk, obviously. But all of my Pop-Tart experience to date says that’s not a great idea. You can sort of get away with dipping the chocolate ones in Milk since they have a chocolate… base? What are Pop-Tarts made of? What substance lies beneath the frosting? And what again beneath that? In the case of Fruit Loop Pop-Tarts, it’s a mystery that’s ̶p̶l̶a̶g̶u̶e̶d̶ tormented us since the dawn of man, and may never be answered.
The best way to eat them is to experience the flavour as best you can, in the fourth dimension. Over time.
All that said, Toasted was as bizarre and remarkable an experience as un-toasted. Go with your gut, which is probably just saying, “Please, think about what you’re doing.”
Question 3: Are there Fruit Loops embedded in the frosting?
No.
That would be unquestionably better.
This… bow-tie appears to be screen-printed onto the hardened frosting shell. Here you can also see bubbling up from the innards of the tart, the pink goop that is doing to my taste buds what A Colour Out of Space did to Nicholas Cage.
Question 4: What is this Pink Goop?
Excellent question, and I wish I had the foggiest. But I can describe its overall essence fairly well, I think.
Looks-wise, think frozen gogurt that isn’t cold. Then really think about that. Keep on thinking. Do you feel like you have brain freeze without eating anything frozen? Congratulations, you’re experiencing the pink goop. At first I thought maybe it had edible glitter in it, and it certainly is sweet enough that that could have been possible, but no, it’s just shiny and wet. You know, as goop is.
The flavour is Fruit Loops, that’s undeniable. Imagine a whole box of Fruit Loops condensed down into a single bite, and you’re close to how concentrated the flavour actually is. When I tell you that eating a single bite of this Pop-Tart was enough to make me swear off Fruit Loops for a while, that’s not hyperbole.
There’s something existential about the sheer magnitude of taste you’re ingesting here. It’s both wholly unnatural, and oppressively familiar. It’s a contradiction that plays itself out in your mouth for as long as you’re chewing, and thrice as long after. The experience is so intense, it conjures up vivid memories you don’t recall having in your mind of the first time you ever ate a Fruit Loop. When the taste was new, and unformed as a concept in your neural pathways. The Fruit Loop Pop-Tart is like drano for those pathways, clearing out all that was old, and leaving behind only this new Fruit Loop experience. Had you been eating Fruit Loops before this, or is the cereal merely a pale imitation of the Fruit Loop Pop-Tart? A harbinger of the coming existence of unfathomable flavour?
Question 5: Am I okay?
I’ve eaten too much, too quickly. In my eagerness to please the masses with content, I have apparently lost sight of my own sanity. I’ve eaten one-and-a-half of these Fruit Loop Pop-Tarts and I feel… well, honestly I feel a lot of things. I feel like I’ve gone through the cycle of sugar crashing at least five times while writing this. Simultaneously hyper-energized, and resigned to being a couch potato.
I’m a living contradiction, much like the Fruit Loop Pop-Tart.
Question 6: Where do we go from here?
Like, as a society. We’ve created something so wholly unnatural, there’s no base flavour in nature that contends besides: Fruit Loop.
I’ve been staring at this unfinished Pop-Tart sitting on the arm of my couch for twenty minutes now. Do I finish it? Do I throw away this purchase, like I did the A&W Pop-Tarts? Do I take it a step further by salting and burning it, not stopping at simply ignoring it, but actively destroying its existence? My mind is telling me this is the moral thing to do. Nothing like this should exist. Humans have played god with food to decent effect with things like the Impossible Whopper. Fruit Loop Pop-Tarts are not the Impossible Whopper. We’ve gone too far this time.
