Pop-Tarts and Me: Perfect Together

I used to have beef with Pop-Tarts and I don’t mean that in the literal sense. I found them, as an organization not a pastry, to be aloof, arrogant and stupid. Their crime was one of omission: omitting a shipping order to send me free crates of the effing things to my home, even when I asked super-nicely and not at all deranged-like. For sampling purposes, you understand. I was attempting to develop a hyper-sophisticated palate and thought that might be of interest to them. It clearly wasn’t. Those idiots.

Well, I’m here to say that all is forgiven. Because from the moment I stepped through the doors of the Pop-Tarts World, the mega-emporium on 42^nd street, and elbowed my way past forlorn tourists and their fat, sweaty spawnlets, I knew I was home. Or rather, in a sublet until January when the places closes its doors, like the corporate cereal company douchebags they….never mind, it’s all love from here on in.

Let me preface my drooling by stating that I’ve been in grander food establishments in my life. Dylan’s Candy Bar on the Upper East Side is pretty frickin’ fantastic with that array of squeezable SweetTarts jelly. And when I die, unbeknownst to my wife (until now) I have made arrangements to lie in state in the Harrods Food Hall, right near the marzipan counter, surrounded by sour pastilles.

Yet, as far as pop-up shops go, this one takes the cake. I am positively smitten with the area where you can get milkshakes with bitty Pop-Tarts, soft-serve ice cream with bitty Pop-Tarts, “homemade” Pop-Tarts, where you choose from an array of fillings and some angels behind the counter create them for you. Hell, you can even get something called “Pop-Tarts sushi” which, personally, I have no interest in.

There are games and t-shirts as well, but if I’m not supposed to eat it and it says “Pop-Tarts” on the package, it probably is best I keep a safe distance.

But the pièce de résistance is the Varietizer, which distributes 72 different kinds of Pop-Tarts, some whose distribution is more limited than Kanye West’s rapping. Whether you want Orange Crème or Ice Cream Sandwich, the machine will collect them, with some mechanical arm and joyously put a dozen of them into a box for you to take with you.

Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. Actually, me walking down the street with twelve Pop-Tarts is like the fox guarding Lindsay Lohan who’s guarding a crackhouse.

Know what? It might be a little bit worse than that.