this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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I remember, years back, talking to some French guy who went to an American store in France with his girlfriend and tried Pop-Tarts, as he'd heard that a lot of Americans like them. He said "These are terrible! I can't understand why anyone would eat these!"
I asked him whether he'd toasted them.
Apparently
I went and looked on the packaging
at the time, they didn't actually tell you to toast them on the package. Just assumed that you know to do that via cultural diffusion or whatever. Looking on Amazon right now, they do apparently stick directions on the thing, so I assume that at some point, enough people ran into trouble with that that they fixed the issue.
that barely helps, toasting "cardboard" doesn't taste much better
That's strange, they had toasting instructions on them in the 70's. Wonder why they'd remove them.
Controversial take, but on the rare occasions I have Pop Tarts I prefer them microwaved.
I do wonder if pop tarts have been enshittified over the years. Over the last couple years I’ve tried them a few times, as a comfort food from my childhood. While I wasnt fooling myself about them being good, were they always this bad?
You have to get frosted, so it’s not all cardboard. I rarely bothered toasting - it’s an improvement to the jelly filling but then you burn your tongue. But it’s still all cardboard and the filling is generally flavorless. I mean I always liked “blueberry” because it never tasted like blueberries but I remember it as having some generic jelly taste and it really doesn’t. There was never much filling but did they cut it back? Did the jelly used to have actual fruit that is now just hfcs and food coloring?
Yes, they have gone through multiple waves of enshitification over the decades. The ones you can buy now are a shadow of what they once were.