Haven’t bought name brand Pop-Tarts in years, but have occasionally picked up Toaster 'Betes or whatever the off-brand versions are called.
Noticed a ‘sale’ on the name brand and got conned into buying them. They’re now smaller, have less frosting, and have way less filling. The damn things were so flimsy that two of them snapped trying to take them out of the toaster.
If you get a craving for some nice sugary betes for breakfast, stick to the off-brands. They’re now higher quality than the name brand.
The future is stupid.
European here: I only once got some imported ones in a shop here and tried them, and I was puzzled why people seem to be so fond of them. They tasted disgusting and artificial.
It’s a lot of childhood marketing associating things like cartoons and commercials for the product. Because they were expensive and sugary, parents would make them a special indigence.
As a child I used to love them when I could get them, then I had a real pastry with jam in the middle never went back. I was so upset about how much better a real part was and why we never have them, when they were basically the same price at the time. But we lived in the county, so an hour-long drive to get them every other day made no sense, either.
Maybe it’s just me, but I ran through a lot of typical heavily marketed food items for kids when I was one, and always ended up hungry an hour later. Learned early on how much of that stuff was garbage.
I never tried them, but I once read their box in a US supermarket and I’m surprised that they could be made lower quality.
Pastries like that should basically be made from flour, water, sugar, fruit, baking soda, and butter. Pop Tarts are not actually food, though. They have an ingredient list as long as your arm full of disgusting and cheap edible food-like substances.
Disgusting and artificial is American, both our people and foods.
It helps a bit if you toast them. That’s what the “pop” part means.
is there a reason moat European pasteries seem so organic and like they weren’t made in a sterile environment?
Less capitalism so far, more small bakeries.
I think the way most cities are organised in the divided states of southern northern america doesn’t work as well with smaller shops. You need walkable city centers for those, and especially rural areas have these large shopping center junctions with Target, Walmart etc and big parking lots - then bigger cities where living downtown is unaffordable and again you have the suburbs with these shopping areas that are almost industrialised. In most of these environments, smaller shops that could sell more or less homemade / handmade flour-based products wouldn’t stand a chance.
large shopping centers don’t exist in rural US cities, thats mid-sized cities.
Assuming you are a DS citizen, your definition of a large shopping center may vary. Also, your definition of rural :) That said, I was referring to “large junctions with shopping centers”, not “junctions with large shopping centers”. What I mean is a road crossing with 3-4 supermarkets, each of which has a parking lot around 200x100 yards
True, I do think of that being the bare minimum lot size for a supermarket :) and am thinking a small city is less than 10,000 people
That’s a town. City starts at 100K in North America.
Personally tho, I don’t think it’s a population thing but a composition thing; any place so spread out you need a car to get around is just a large suburb. LA? Houston? Just overgrown suburbs. Yes by that definition, only NYC, DC, maybe Boston and Chicago are cities.
Wel, moats are not known for being sterile