Ode to a Pop Tart (and good food in general) … Part 1

Before I get to the pop tart, allow me to briefly recap how I came to the whole natural food thing, now called the slow food movement, decades before it became popular and not in any hippy/trend setting way. I came to it in the most normal and boring way possible, I was a girl trying to lose weight.

I had discovered in college that most of the forbidden foods of childhood (Cap’n Crunch, for one, or Frosted Flakes), were in fact quite disgusting. But still there were many packaged/processed sweets that I was addicted to still. Kellog’s pop tarts (cherry flavored, with frosting), ‘Nilla wafers, Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Twizzlers as just a few examples. Perish the thought these days, but then, perfectly normal and acceptable.

I was a bartender in the early nineties with a bad junk food habit. I would eat Sprees and Skittles by the handful as a way to get through the shift. Accompanied by my daily ephedrine habit* (necessary to get through three jobs and keep my partying creds alive), I didn’t really gain much weight. But when I decided to drop the ephedrine**, I decided I had to kick the junk food. I explored two options:

1. Keep the sweet tooth, but go along with the current Snackwells craze. If you don’t remember Snackwells, they were these extremely low calorie snacks that tasted just about the same as regular packaged cookies and crackers.
2. Allow myself my sweet tooth, but go very high-end on quality and long on labor to get it. For example, if I wanted chocolate, I had to make myself a chocolate cake from scratch--no mixes--to satisfy it.

The Snackwell route was definitely the easiest and cheapest way to go. But fortunately for me right about that time I read an article investigating this new craze and how it actually caused people to gain weight, not lose it or even maintain. The theory (now nearly proven I believe) was that despite Snackwell’s low calorie count, it encouraged ingestion of more volume of food. Now the body apparently gets used to a certain volume before it ever gets around to dealing with the calorie count. So what happened was that when you got used to eating 10 Snackwell cookies or crackers to satisfy a craving, your body got used to 10 cookies or crackers period, regardless of the calorie count. So if you didn’t have Snackwell’s handy, you’d eat 10 cookies or crackers, no matter what the calorie count was because that’s what your brain/body had gotten used to. This made a lot of sense to me, even though it was only a hypothesis at the time I read the article. So the Snackwell route was out as a means to reduce junk food calories. Fact was, I had no resistance to my cravings and would have given into them whether the low calorie option was available or not.

The second option appealed to me in that I had a desire to improve my culinary capabilities. And I stuck to it. Because I still got to eat sweets and I got to enjoy them more. I became a better baker, ate sweets less frequently, and enjoyed them more than I ever had since my mother stopped baking from scratch. Then I stumbled across an unexpected side effect when, after a year or so of doing this, I indulged an old craving—Oreos.

They … tasted … like … CRAP! I used to love these things! What happened? Oreos split apart, the white stuff licked off first, the cookie dipped in milk or crumbled over ice cream. This used to be a wondrous thing! Now, all I could taste was the salt. All the salt used to help preserve these pre-packaged processed pieces of crap.

This was 1994 by the way. Long before Whole Foods starting taking your Whole Paycheck. Long before the urban revolt against hormones, antibiotics, and cannibalistic cows and chickens. Long before I even knew why the Oreos (and subsequently the ‘Nilla wafers, the Chips Ahoy, the Skittles, and the Kellog pop-tarts) tasted bad to me. This was before Bill Maher and his tirade against high fructose corn syrup. I had stumbled upon the great truth of food. Processed bad, natural good.

To be continued …

*In case you don’t know what ephedrine is, it’s a bronchial dilator that effectively acts as legal speed and an appetite suppressant. Due to the aforementioned three jobs and a prioritization of the beer budget over decent food expenditures, I needed the appetite and sleep suppressant to get through. I never indulged to the extent that caused all the hoopla later with idiot kids ingesting 10-20 at a time for the rush.

**The decision to drop ephedrine had little to do with its known health detriments and more with the fact that on ephedrine you talk incessantly drove even me nuts with myself. My apologies to all I annoyed before coming to that realization myself.