In December, I think I saw gingerbread pop tarts. I should’ve gotten them, they’re gone now.
I’m assuming it was in the pre-Costco era?
A while back while noodling around on Google, I found a blog written by a family whose parents were missionaries in a Third World country. The dad wrote that as a child in the 1960s, he’d always loved Maypo but then they reformulated it and it was OK, but it wasn’t the same. One day, his wife bought some bulghur wheat at the market; this was not an item native to the region, but aid workers would sometimes bring in bags of it, and people would sell or barter it, and other things, that they couldn’t use.
I think you can guess where this is going. She cooked it and served it one morning, and he took one bite and said, “THIS is Maypo!” It didn’t have the maple flavoring, but he recognized the texture for what it was immediately.
IIRC, they changed it to oatmeal, with the same flavorings.
I buy a local brand of oatmeal, whole flattened oats, put barely enough water in the bowl and nuke it for about 3 minutes. That way, it has actual texture. Golden raisins and chopped walnuts along with the butter and sugar make it immensely more enjoyable than properly-cooked oatmeal.
It would have been in either 2003 or 2004, from some small town he visited that he often got these boxes from.
Hmm, my recollection of Maypo is that I liked it quite a lot as a kid. But my mother almost never bought it - the whole point of cereal for breakfast is that it’s no work. If you have to cook it, that convenience goes away. Or did before microwaves, anyway.
Now I want some Maypo, but a quick check of Amazon shows that, as noted above, it’s made of oatmeal now, not wheat. Oh well. I probably would find it too sickeningly sweet anyway.
supposedly poptarts were originally made out of cracker crumbs …
The TV show that triggered my OP did not mention that. But I suppose they might have been trying to use something that would be discarded.
Bulghur wheat is parcooked and only takes about 10-12 minutes to be ready. However, I do understand why your mother might have preferred cold, ready-to-eat cereal.
I buy strawberry pop tarts They’re good for a quick meal on the way to work.
Toast and jelly is messier and you can’t easily eat it in the car.
I remember watching Peanuts specials on TV when I was a kid, and they were “brought to you by Dolly Madison snack cakes”. I wanted to try them, but couldn’t; they weren’t available in the northwest.
I’ve never had a zinger, and it doesn’t look like I ever will.
Yanno, that’s kind of like having a baked potato with sour cream, chives, and bacon bits. The potato is just an excuse for eating the rest of the stuff.
Amazon has Zingers of various flavors.
Those were always my favourite. Let me see if I can describe the experience from memory:
Think of the most generic chocolate sponge cake: not dried out, not wet, just kind of unnaturally moist. As a kid I didn’t find it cloyingly sweet, but I bet it was. Inside, there are three dots* of a sort of liquidized oreo centre that remind you disturbingly of cream that wanted to be whipped cream but took a darker, even less wholesome path. Over the top is a layer of material made from the food industry’s best attempt to replicate plastic in sugar: while you can eat it, you can also easily peel it off in a single layer and carry it around or put it into your sandwich.
They are both delicious and disgusting. Like ortolan, they should be eaten with a napkin over your head to hide your shame from God.
*This is my memory, but not borne out by google images. I may have conflated them with twinkies, which I didn’t like but would eat because sugar.
Further edit: I remember having a kindred treat in my school lunch, a hostess cupcake, in kindergarten. Ants got into it somehow, and I remember my schoolmates’ disgust / mockery as I ate it anyway. I guess I was too young to know you didn’t eat ants. A kinder staff would have given me a new cupcake, or at least distracted me with the idea.
I would not care to eat oatmeal just plain, any more than I would like to eat an unadorned baked potato. However, the idea of just eating the dressings is not very appealing either.
I prefer to prepare them in the toaster. I like them well-done. Also, unfrosted Blueberry are the absolute best in my book. Also, I feel no shame about any of this. 
Growing up in the 60s, Brown Sugar Cinnamon Toast-Ems were the best. They had more filling than Pop Tarts and were softer out of the toaster. I used to slather them with Parkay liquid margarine out of the squeeze bottle.
One of the stores of my youth used to carry a pop-tart knockoff that decorated the surface with coarse grains of sugar instead of that awful glaze.
I stopped by a 7-Eleven this evening for a quart of milk. Lo and behold, they had Zingers, so I picked up a three-pack of the Devil’s Food.
Meh, no big deal, but one more thing off my bucket list. Maybe I’ll try the raspberry ones if I see them.