The times, they are a changin'

I had  Pop•Tarts® this morning.  It's been years since I had one.  You'd think having kids would force to to fill my cupboards with boxes of the flaky pastries but no.  My son is a cereal and frozen pancake freak.  My daughter likes that as well, but she eats her cereal without milk.  Odd.

Anyway, I went shopping the other day and I had a coupon so I figured I'd get some.  Now when I was a kid, the flavor choices were limited.  Strawberry.  Brown sugar & cinnamon (those two are always linked, aren't they?).  Oh, and there was probably a Dutch Apple.  And you could get any of these in frosted or unfrosted.  The strawberry variety had frosting with little colored sugar sprinkles.  And that was my favorite.  The unfrosted ones were just too dry and I wasn't going near the other flavors.  And it had to be toasted.

Many years have passed and I find that the Pop Tarts family has expanded.  My beloved strawberry is still there and it's now available in Multi Grain to make the whiny parents coalitions happy.  I bought that for myself.  The frosting was reduced to some white swirls, ostensibly to cut back on the calorie content, but they were still good.  So what would my kids want?  I see they've added chocolate to the menu.  But they've also added Pop Tarts Splitz (anyone working in kid marketing for as long as I did knows that changing the "s" to a "z" gives you instant street cred).  These are toaster treats with two flavors side by side.  I got the chocolate/strawberry and the chocolate/vanilla (they were 3 for $5).

So what's my point with all this?  I wonder what was going on in the 70s when I was roaming the cereal aisles of Long Island.  Allow me to lapse into my grumpy old man voice: we didn't have Splitz when I was a boy.  We had one flavor!  And sometimes we toasted them and you'd bite into it and the filling would burn your lips and you'd cry "boo hoo, the delicious strawberry filling is burning my lips" but we liked it that way!

Two flavors in one Pop Tart?   I guess what I'm trying to determine is whether or not we were stupid in the 70s.  Clothing and music notwithstanding, no one ever thought to combine the flavors.  It's not a particularly genius idea.  Was the technology not available back then?  Or were we, as human beings, not evolved to the point of this discovery?  Perhaps our minds weren't capable of conceiving things of this magnitude.  I mean after all,  no one in my generation ever had any drink that was blue and look at the shelves now!

The future looks bright.  Or at least tasty.