I find the concept of breakfast bars to be fascinating. All the magic of cereal distilled and molded like sugary Play-Doh into portable, rectangular chunks? They’re the next best thing to carrying around a heart-shaped locket with Toucan Sam’s face inside.

At the same time, I yearn for a simpler era of breakfast bars. I yearn for the days when our only option was bits of actual cereal haphazardly Elmer’s glued together by a sweet, gelatinous white goo that could somehow legally be called “milk.”

But now we live in an era of protein and quinoa and whatever the hell “activated almonds” are. So I’ll happily review one more Kashi Plant-Powered Bar, but I’ll do it with a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time—a time when I accepted a dare to eat just the milk layer of a cereal bar and spent the rest of the dazed afternoon unsure what century it was.

The bar of the day is Dark Chocolate Cashew Chia, and it’s the only Plant-Powered bar whose name sounds like a Whole Foods conversation interrupted by a sneeze.

The bar looks like a diagram straight out of some introductory level geology textbook. With cracked crags of fossilized cashews, a valley-filled terrain of brooding chocolate, and an underground filled with glossy seed sediment, this bar is a preserved specimen from some snack food Jurassic period.

Mobile snackers beware: this bar is messy. The cashew bits like to pop out of place and avalanche onto your lap after even the slightest disturbance. Their taste, meanwhile, is pleasant. It’s a mild, crisp nuttiness that doesn’t overwhelm the bar’s more interesting flavor: the dark chocolate.

Speaking of the dark chocolate, I wish there was more of it. It has a rich, complex, and slightly bitter fudge taste that combines with the nuts for a grown-up Rocky Road sensation. I guess I’ll just have to toss a handful of marshmallows in my mouth after each bite to complete the experience.

I’d be satisfied if my cause of death was “a breakfast bar game of Chubby Bunny.”

In the previous bar I reviewed from this line, the “exotic” seeds in the bar were what ruined the experience. I’m happy to say that the chia pieces in this bar are much more subtle in their seediness; they provide half-nutty, half-bitter bursts that actually work quite well with the theme of the bar. A faint sticky sweetness really brings it all together, too (both literally and taste-wise).

So while this bar isn’t going to revolutionize breakfast or make me ditch my morning cereal (apparently I’m one of the 60% who isn’t too lazy to wash a bowl), but it makes for a good mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or mid-midnight snack. What, you guys don’t call 12:30am “mid-midnight?”

It’s pretty much a Snickers bar with a more plant-y caramel ribbon. Now I wouldn’t give a Kashi bar to any trick-or-treaters, but it’s still probably more fun than a fun-sized Mary Jane.

I think I’ve had one of those stuck in my teeth since the snack food Cretaceous period.

The Bowl: Kashi GoLean Dark Chocolate Cashew Chia Plant-Powered Bar

The Breakdown: Not the most exciting bar, but it’s hard to stay mad at a nutty and fudgy adult Snickers bar that’s socially acceptable to eat at 8:00am.

The Bottom Line: 8.5 folded pictures of Tony the Tiger in my wallet out of 10.