I could say I’m a little late with sharing the newest Empty Bowl episode here, but I was just really waiting until I could sense the whole cereal community would need it most.
And that’s why I’m writing this on a Sunday evening: the work week’s River Styx. Steady these last few uneasy hours and make the most of this molting weekend with thirty-six minutes (our longest yet!) of hot cereal news, cool reviews, and warm memories.
In this episode, Justin and I recount the tale of Freedom Crunch, wrestle with Mighty Spoon, and bring Sonic into the cerealverse’s canon. If your Sunday’s feeling more like a Dying-Starday, you can find more 20–30 minute condensed Saturday vibes at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but they definitely unconsciously influence our cereal cartography.
Do you hear that? Those foreboding rumbling of a tectonic plate sandwiched between two others, heralding the beginning of something…cataclysmic?
It’s an anomaly in Earth’s chocolate cookie crust, and we haven’t felt one of this magnitude since the great Oreo Cheesequake that turned countless communities upside down—while leaving them dizzyingly unable to fall.
Yes, we seem to be reaching critically crème-y mass, with newly spotted Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal being the third cereal of its Oreo-flavored kind to arrive this past month. While I thought the Oreo craze peaked two years ago with the olfactory onslaught of perhaps unnecessarily zany cookie flavors, from Mississippi Mud Pie to the Swedish Fish who for some reason swim in it.
But now that Nabisco’s mad science has tempered to a sort of eccentric performance art, with more reasonable flavors like Latte Thins and Rocky Road, it feels high time for the famous cookie’s signature flavor to return to its black & white simplicity, once again populating both owned brand and imitator products all across the grocery store. Spotted by @m_huddy at Woodman’s (thanks!), Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal brings a two-toned filling (a la S’Mores Krave) to a fascinatingly chip-studded P-TC shell.
While I am more excited for C&C Pop-Tarts Cereal, I am close to predicting it dead in the skim-diluted water. Why? Because it feels like a direct chaser to Cookies ‘n’ Creme Fillows, which were so good (and dense!) that I have serious doubts the comparatively welterweight anatomy of Pop-Tarts Cereal will even be able to touch gloves with General Mills’ game-changing, choco-icing champion.
Perhaps I’ll just have to pit them head to head, M&M’s style. Don’t blame me, Pop-Tarts, it’s a natural cereal phenomenon: survival of the crème-swollen fattest.
