It’s the Pop-Tarts. They could be dangerous. And your toaster, too. What I have to tell you is a shocking tale of innocent trust, of leaving Pop-Tarts in a toaster to drive the kids to school, and of Pop-Tarts getting stuck in the unattended toaster and causing a fire while the person who put the Pop-Tarts in the toaster was taking the kids to school.
This is what happened to the Hurff family. And Brenda Hurff is suing The Kellogg Company, which makes Pop-Tarts. She is also suing Black and Decker, which makes the toaster. No word yet on whether she is suing herself for leaving the toaster unattended. Over the past ten years, the U.S. government has received 17 reports of fires involving toaster pastries. That’s an incredible 1.7 toaster-pastry-related fires per year. Apparently the jam in Pop-Tarts is a little more flammable then the bread in bread. Let’s calculate the risk here.
This year the Pop-Tart people reported $500 million in U.S. sales. It costs about $2 per box of Pop-Tarts. If there are six pastries to a box, 15 billion Pop-Tarts were sold this year. With tarts toasted two at a time, there were 7.5 billion opportunities this year to lose your home to Pop-Tarts. An average 1.7 reported incidents per year means that your chances of being burned by Pop-Tarts during any given toasting are about 1 in 4 billion. Yet, Pop-Tarts continue to be inserted into toasters. And people also keep putting food in frying pans on stoves hamburgers, scrambled eggs, you name it. People, listen to me: Don’t play with fire. Just buy cereal. Cold cereal. It’s safer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
1 reply on “Killer Pop-Tarts”
Flamming pop tarts are for real. I used to think it may be just something that if left in the toaster may just as soon catch fire like any other piece of bread. But mine occurred twice. Once in 1985 and the second a year later. Both times in normally functioning toasters and the good thing was that I happened to be there in the house when they went up.
Thinking it was just me and bad luck, i only recently thought maybe other people had the same experience.…and if you do a Google search on “flaming pop-tarts” you will find a lot of people who have experienced the same thing. I have no idea what is so flammable in a strawberry frosted pop-tart, but it maybe just the weapon the Military needs to send to our enemies. Thinking they have the latest in foreign aid, they will soon wipe themselves out with the flaming pop-tarts setting their huts on fire!