I have a contentious relationship with change.

Change is what replaced the Saturday morning adventures of TJ Detweiler, Pepper Ann Pearson, and Doug Funny with 10-year-old infomercials for the NuWave Oven.

Change is what forced out totally believable, badass bad guys like Grand Moff Tarkin in favor of obnoxiously nasally Disney spinoff characters.

Change made McDonald’s French fries less irresistible, banished Oreo O’s to Korea (the good one), and turned fifth grade gym classes of army dodgeball into sixth grade gym classes of badminton. Bad-freaking-mittens.

I have a contentious relationship with change, especially when I’m holding up the line at the grocery store because I’m three pennies short of the $1.88 I need to buy a box of Froot Loops.

“Oh. Just take it.”

I grin at the pimply-faced high schooler behind the register at Weis. I have a strong desire to pull my resident old-man card and reminiscence on my own days working through that hell on earth we call “summer jobs,” but then again, I’ve already gotten my blast from the past for one day. Besides, no one wants to relive Kmart at $7.25 an hour. Trust me.

Modern man may have relegated the greatest cartoons of all time to fuzzy YouTube videos, but it’s good to know that Toucan Sam and Froot Loops still get a place on the endcaps of grocery store aisles. This is one cereal that I can count on, obnoxiously large beaked mascot and all.

In the interest of pretentious literary maxims, I stubbornly refuse to use the obvious cliché and compare the ageless taste of Froot Loops to the monotonous monologue of a Toucan repeating the same words every day. All day. Forever.

I do not, however, refuse to note that Froot Loops remains a stubborn holdover from a day and age when cereal was pretty much just crap (nutritionally speaking) and we as a society were cool with that, just like we were cool with a two-dimensional Super Mario in 8-bits and good old Vitamin D fortified whole milk.

Where General Mills has done away with the faux-fruit shaped cereal pieces in Trix and even cut down its colors from six to four, Froot Loops continues to sport sugar as its first ingredient. Likewise, Toucan Sam proudly displays Blue 1 and Red 40 in the fine print of the box label. And where the latest iteration of Cheerios uses real Strawberry puree in its base, Froot Loops gives a high five to wheat flour, modified food starch, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.

I assure you that all of these monuments of food engineering are necessary to contribute to the essentiality of the loops and their fruitiness frootiness.

I open the box soon after my little grocery store foray and pick out a single loop—a blue one. I imagine, if sugared blue loops could talk, that he’s waving goodbye to his orange and purple friends and smiling about being chosen (Sorry, Toy Story was on Disney Channel last night). Mercilessly, I crunch down.

This is the first thing I love about Froot Loops: they’re crunchy. Not shatteringly crispy like Chex, chewy like Kashi’s puffs, or blasted into a gazillion little wheaty specks of cereal dust like Frosted Mini-Wheats, Froot Loops are just crunchy. The crunch isn’t overbearing, though; there’s an initial snap and then buckling of the corn flour blend, an altogether enjoyable balance if, like me, you’re a serial cereal snacker and pop these things like tic-tacs.

Our little blue friend is hyper-sweet even after all these years. He does not taste like a blueberry. He does not taste like a banana. He tastes, for lack of a better adjective, like the flavor Froot Loop. You are saying to yourself: you can’t do that. my fifth grade language arts teacher said you can never define a word with the same word. Sure you can. How else do you describe the taste of saccharine?

Speaking of saccharine, it’s the main sweetener in the cola Tab. Tab, which also happens to be my favorite soda, was invented in 1963. Do you know what else was invented in 1963?

Froot Loops.

Stay with me friends.

It’s been rumored that the six colors of Froot Loops all taste the same. Well, duh. Allow me to pull an old man card and quote my nine-year-old self: “No dip Sherlock.”

This about it: Have you ever had a fruit salad with bananas, oranges, limes, blueberries, grapes, and strawberries? If you stick six different fruits in your mouth at one time it’s going to taste weird, so it makes perfect sense that all the loops should taste the same. Besides, you don’t want to start playing favorites with different colored fruits, implying one is better than the other (think about poor lime!) I mean, kids eat this stuff, man. With six different colors but the same taste, Froot Loops provides a powerful social commentary on the importance of diversity.

Still, I like orange the best, is case you really wanna know.

To be sure, some things have changed about Froot Loops. Back when Bear Bryant was still coaching the Roll Damn Tide, Froot Loops had just 8 essential vitamins and minerals and only 3 colors. Likewise, Froot Loops made headlines when fiber was added in 2009, and to tell you truth, they’re not as crunchy as they were back in the good old days on Nintendo 64 and Brittany Spears. Still, the ingredients haven’t changed much in three decades, and the few changes Froot Loops have undergone are tolerable. Read: I’m eating cereal, not corn nuts, and a guy’s gotta poop anyways.

By far, the best thing about Froot Loops is the glaze. Thin and sweet like donut glaze, with a smooth mouthfeel that fills over the tiny holes dotting the toasted pieces of the corn and oat blend, the glaze must be proprietary, because no Fruit Rings or Frooty Loopers or even Tootie Fruties can match it. It provides an enjoyable, dare I say LICKABLE mouthfeel when eaten dry, while also laying down a slip and slide friction that makes each ring so refreshingly mushy in milk. Yes, refreshingly mushy—smooth on the outside, each loop slowly disintegrates when subjected to the first stage of mechanical digestion, allowing you to enjoy the full blasted froot loop flavor in the slow chomp of molars. It’s like eating a dense and thick artisan bread, except with more vitamins and minerals and tons of froot loop flavor.

There’s another reason I’m savoring my mouthful of Froot Loops. It’s no secret that sales of cold cereals have plummeted like a fat guy on a high dive, and with marketing to millennials a concern, Kellogg’s is hoping that by removing artificial ingredients from all its cereals—including my beloved Loops—the company will recapture some of its market share. Change is inevitable, and by 2018, Froot Loops will have a new, cleaner set of ingredients.

I have a contentious relationship with change. But for the time being, I have a mouthful of Froot Loops. And Tab. And frankly, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

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The Bowl: Froot Loops

The Breakdown: Like an ambiguously flavored fruit donut, with a hypersweet taste that is and always will be classic*, Froot Loops delivers a refreshingly mushy crunch in milk while also offering dry snackability despite its one-note flavor.

The Bottom Line: 9 cans of saccharine blasted Tab of out 10.

*Until 2018.

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Adam Nettina is a freelance writer and editor whose body composition is approximately 36% Waffle Crisp.