Almost every family has a secret they never discuss. Ours is this: We were taste testers for Pop-Tarts.
It was not long after Kellogg’s introduced the toaster pastry in 1964. But for several months one year (none of us can pinpoint the exact date), brown cardboard boxes arrived on our doorstep with an assortment of Pop-Tarts tucked inside. Strawberry. Raspberry. Brown-Sugar Cinnamon. We ate them all. After dinner. Sometimes hot, usually cold. With frosting and without.
Neither I nor any of my seven siblings can recall how we came to be Pop-Tart critics, and my parents aren’t alive to tell us. But I have a theory: My mother was resourceful and, with eight children to feed, she probably saw an appeal for tasters somewhere and thought: “Oh, boy. Free dessert.”
Whatever the reason, we were witnesses to food history. Today, as Kellogg’s prepares to celebrate the 60th birthday of Pop-Tarts next year, they remain a cultural touchstone. Last year, more than two billion were sold, according to the company. They’ve been depicted on art murals, exhibited in museums and parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
And like Barbie, they even have their own movie: Next year, Jerry Seinfeld plans to release “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story,” a farcical chronicle of the race to win the breakfast-pastry wars, which Post began with its own toaster pastry, Country Squares, six months before Kellogg’s introduced Pop-Tarts.
Mr. Seinfeld, who directs and stars in the Netflix film, based his script on a joke in his stand-up routine, and invited a baker’s dozen of his friends to join him onscreen, including Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy and Hugh Grant.
In an interview, he recalled a boyhood trip with his mother to the supermarket, where, upon seeing a box of Pop-Tarts, “I just grabbed it.”
They were a revelation for a kid who ate dry toast. “They seemed very futuristic,” Mr. Seinfeld said.
Even the name — Kellogg’s considered calling them “fruit scones” — was changed to reflect the sensibilities of the ’60s, when Pop Art was ascendant. And they transformed the lowly toaster into more than just an appliance for browning bread.
To me and my siblings, Pop-Tarts were exotic. We were raised in a small agricultural community in the shadow of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains and got most of our food from the farms and dairies that dotted the outskirts of town. Processed food was rare in our house, and store-bought sweets rarer still, as it was cheaper to bake dozens of homemade cookies on a Sunday to be divvied up during the week.
The Pop-Tarts were delivered to our door in a cardboard box about the size of a footstool, with nothing on the outside to indicate flavor, frosting or even that it was from Kellogg’s. The individual packages inside were marked with only a number.
I was barely in kindergarten, as I recall. But I was captivated, like one of the hominids in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — only, instead of staring at a black alien monolith, I was transfixed by a cardboard box. (In his 2020 Netflix special, Mr. Seinfeld echoed a similar sentiment about seeing Pop-Tarts for the first time: “We were just chimps in the dirt playing with sticks.”)
When our family food experiment began, Pop-Tarts were already in stores, but we got unreleased flavors our neighbors and classmates couldn’t buy. And that made us special.
One sister recalls that our father locked the Pop-Tarts in the basement for safekeeping. This makes sense. Food left unattended in a big family tends to disappear quickly, and my parents guarded the Pop-Tarts the way Harry Winston watches over its diamonds on Oscar night.
