It builds up richness
Pop Tarts have always seemed to me to be the ultimate triumph of convenience over edibility. They’re horrible, they burn your tongue, and all they do is save you the effort of buttering and applying jam to a piece of toast. Do they resemble food? I suppose they’re a good way to get quick calories into earthquake survivors.
Truly the Power of Beelzebub protects his arteries
Pop Tarts are a pretty tasty biscuit if eaten cold. They are in no way a breakfast.
Agreed. We haven’t had them around in years, but we used to keep some brown sugar Pop-Tarts around to snack on.
I used to eat the frosted ones. Nibble around the edges to get the dry stuff over with, then reward myself with the creamy crunchy sugary middle. The fruit ones were vile.
Frosted Brown Sugar-Cinnamon. Two (usually) every breakfast. For years.
Cold. Liked ’em better that way.
They are a nice snack while riding horseback in the mountains, but I agree, breakfast they are only good for those less than 6 years old…
I don’t think pop tarts is a really good breakfast for 5 year olds.
Each day’s set of panels gives horrible new insight to this story’s title.
I suppose Pop Tarts resemble food in the same way that Tom resembles a decent human being.
As Brian’s cross-Atlantic counterpart once noted (S7E20) “This stuff has purple inside. Purple is a fruit.”
They definitely count for one of your 5 daily portions of fruit and veg. As do Jamie Dodgers and Jaffa Cakes. Eat 5 Jaffa Cakes, you’ve done your quota and you can eat that Super size Cheese Burger with a clear conscience.
Are there… skulls in the smoke from the pan?
Also, Brian has clearly trained in the samurai art of naked hot pastry catch.
Many Pop-Tart™ flavors are quite nice! And they have a shelf life of approximately forever. The protons in their atoms would decay before they would
Look, it isn’t the best item for you, by any stretch, at any time. But frosted fudge chocolate (in the legal sense, mayyyybe, they qualify as chocolate) poptarts are pretty close to factory assembled food perfection after they cool down about 15 seconds.
This may be the most important piece of wisdom ever to appear in this comment section. For a very happy eight or nine months in the late 1980s, lunch every day was a Jamaican patty or two and a ginger beer, followed by Earl Grey tea and a chocolate fudge pop tart.
Hmm, Earl Grey pop tarts. Now there’s an idea.
I used to eat Pop Tarts for dinner a lot, but that was because everything else I could get out of the vending machine was even further from being food.
You also worked for Gateshead Council Work Study Dept?
Is that you, Angry Kev? Have you assumed a new identity since leaving?
I used to work a 7 PM–7 AM shift as server support at IBM. Due to the odd hours and the nature of the job as long stretches of boredom punctuated by unpredictable periods of frantic damage control, the cafeteria wasn’t always open when I was hungry and had time to get food. Sometimes the vending machines had sketchy sandwiches, but often it was a choice between cold Pop Tarts and stale powdered mini-donuts. Or, like, M&Ms.
I’m surprised most comments are about the Pop Tarts. Seeing Brian’s “richness mug” reminds me of my mother’s bowl of dripping. It seemed to have magical properties in that she could scoop some out, do some serious frying, then pour it back in and the level would remain the same (!) The primordial stratum likely predates me. Her guilty pleasure was to skim the top for a dripping sandwich. Yes, she is still alive, has no cardiovascular problems and is moderately sized. I haven’t ruled out beelzebub protecting her arteries but it is more likely to be the “what you don’t know about can’t harm you” effect. Unfortunately I learned a little about the chemistry of lipid oxidation at high temperatures and now I have to sit in the corner with my porridge.
All the guff we got since the ’70s about how saturated fat was the devil turned out to be totally false. What was killing us all these decades was trans fat (“hydrogenated vegetable oil”) and sugar. The sugar lobby managed to demonize fat, and here we all are in overwhelmingly worse health.
Eat all the saturated fat you like, it’s super great. Butter butter butter.
Crisco, that’s the stuff. Didn’t every American kitchen have a tub of that in the larder?
Lard! Magical porcine lipid!
By the way the story of how this happened is that the US Congress is dumb and a guy did a study of Indonesian (iirc) eating habits vs heart disease, and saw they ate less sat fat with lower heart disease. At the time the WHO rejected the study because of insufficient controls, but the US Congress LOVED it, a great way to support all of their favorite pet projects. Turns out, these folks had less heart disease most likely because they ate so much less carbs.
Oooopsie
I’ve learned that not everybody reacts to the world in the same way. That’s why Mark Twain lived to a ripe old age smoking stogies.
My doctor once told me that about 20 percent of his patients reacted poorly to a high salt intake. The rest slough it off.
I love this side of Brian. He’s like an uncle for Billie, a cool uncle who treats her like a daughter ❤.
Pop tarts are absolutely delicious and if you can’t let them cool down before eating, I would advise you to avoid pizza. Literally their only flaw is their exorbitant pricing
The tricky part is that they take longer to prepare than it seems since you cannot eat them directly out of the toaster.
Which is why I buy the generic house brand “Frosted Toaster Pastries.”
My roommate also does the thing where he keeps a bowl of fat lying around to use for cooking. Can’t recommend the smell though.
My head is reading Brian’s Insides and loving it, but my heart is already with the Steeple Summer Special.
I will buy as many of these as you want to write and get Max and Sammy to illustrate, sir.
That shape though.. I picture a group of college guys doing a “Terra Nova” meal (for obscure, but probably college-club-related reasons). “Who dropped a Pop-Tart in the bloody hoosh?”
Don’t say that to the Gilmore Girls.
Yeah I have sensitivity to eggs and bacon grease too. Doesn’t stop me from eating it though. But as the years passed I’ve learned exactly how much time I have from eating it to needing to spend an hour on the toilet.
That could be a problem, in that Billie, brutal beast that she is, has shattered the toilet.
I’m very late to the party, but I’m surprised that nobody has shared https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/