An Affair of the Tart : Much of the News Is Perplexing, but at Least One Problem Is Simple Enough to Understand

I have two Pop-Tarts in front of me at the moment. One is strawberry, the other chocolate--chocolate fudge, to be exact, because the supermarket was out of the milk chocolate kind. The strawberry Pop-Tart has a crisp, pale crust that picks up an almost yeasty flavor in the toaster, a taste that contrasts nicely with the sharply sweet smear of hot jam inside. The chocolate one has something of a mealy texture and practically sings with the sort of cloying, slightly high cheap-cocoa taste you sometimes find in low-fat cookies. Even a 3-year-old could tell the Pop-Tarts apart in a second, if she had reason to, by the sprinkles on the chocolate-frosted flank alone. Although she might actually prefer the fudgy one; 3-year-olds can be funny that way.

Still, thousands of boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts were recalled by their manufacturer last month because some of the boxes happened to contain chocolate Pop-Tarts by mistake. How did the mix-up happen? Was it the work of granola bar terrorists? Industrial sabotage by Snap, Crackle and Pop? Poor quality control? And how was it discovered? By a minded minion of the slumming boomers in the Frosted Flakes commercials? By a fourth-grader in Norwalk or Rolling Hills who had been looking forward all morning to a jam-filled treat, only to have her entire day bummed out by some toaster-scorched replica of a SnackWell’s? Could it have been some half-baked conspiracy involving Keebler elves and a grassy knoll? Concerned friends have mentioned delicately that I may have been thinking about the Pop-Tart crisis a bit too obsessively over the last couple of weeks.

It’s not like I’ve lost touch with the world; I still manage to read the front page and everything. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia seems to have become a Balkan war-criminals’ version of a round-robin tennis tournament, with Serbia as the No. 1 seed and Croatia coming back from its bye. On one of his ever-rarer days in California, Gov. Pete (The Weatherman) Wilson (he needs no pollster to know which way the wind’s a-blowin’) sued the state he’s supposed to be governing. The dudes on C-Span have been talking about the Clean Water Act as though it’s as laden with coliform bacteria as Santa Monica Bay used to be before the act was enforced.

But at a certain point in life, I guess, a guy begins to prefer problems that he can understand, which is probably why, in the public discourse anyway, being tough on crime comes down to executing more criminals, educational reform means allowing prayer in schools, and complex issues of economics becomes balancing the national checkbook like your late Uncle Manny always nagged you to do. This is also, I’m sure, why, in the face of Bosnian genocide and the congressional disemboweling of President Bill Clinton’s entire domestic policy, the President chose to respond by clamping down on cigarette machines in pizza joints. Joe Camel he can handle.

You can talk about the morass of bureaucratic regulation hastening the decline of American industrial competitiveness if you must. I’ll stick to Pop-Tarts. In this case, old-fashioned American red tape, as yet unmolested by new-style tort “reform,” may have won the day. Could not the fear of litigation, perhaps from the parents of a cocoa-sensitive child unwittingly injured by the erroneously labeled toaster pastry, have contributed to the speediness of the recall?

Consumers who buy strawberry Pop-Tarts get strawberry Pop-Tarts. The company avoids the cost of a possible class-action suit. Readers of editorial pages are spared endless japery at the expense of a legal process that may have rewarded a strawberry-loving plaintiff even half so generously as McDonald’s was initially required to reward the woman scalded by its coffee a couple of years ago. And America may be just a little bit better place in which to live.