Police Threaten to Arrest Creator of Pop Tart Cheese Sandwich

If we’re talking recent history, strawberry and cheese has become a pretty fraught food combination. Recall, if you can, the atrociously-photographed strawberry-topped pizza that nauseated much of Twitter mere weeks ago. Truly nasty!

Well, if that wasn’t enough, consider the following calculus: a lone Kraft Single slipped between two flat, rectangular pastries with sweaty, processed strawberry-flavored filling.

Last Thursday, Iowa State University sophomore Chris Jorgensen shared a photograph of this Frankenfood he'd created while rummaging helplessly through his cupboards and pantries one night. All he could find was a sad slice of cheese and Pop-Tarts.

In a fit of desperation, he stuck a Kraft single between two Strawberry Pop-Tarts, took a photograph, and posted it to Twitter. “You ain’t from Iowa if you never had one of these,” he charged in the tweet’s caption. Bone apple tea indeed, baby!

“The reason I put cheese on it was to play into that joke I’ve seen on Twitter before," Jorgensen told MUNCHIES over the phone on Tuesday morning, referencing the platform's vibrant cottage industry of ugly food photographs much like the sandwich's strawberry pizza antecedent. “I did not put cheese on a Pop-Tart with the intent of eating it as a snack I would enjoy.”

Here was the kind of aggressively unappetizing tweet intentionally engineered to go viral, which is, well, exactly what happened. Jorgensen’s tweet caught the attention of WorldStarHipHop and his university’s police department, the latter of whom, on Monday, jokingly tweeted that Jorgensen would be under arrest for this gastronomic misdemeanor.

Jorgensen (who, let's be clear, was not arrested) assured MUNCHIES that this was all in good fun. “I work at the student newspaper at Iowa State, and we kind of have a relationship with the police department. They always are open to making jokes on Twitter. So I tagged them and knew they would play along,” Jorgensen said, referencing a tweet wherein he claimed that the Police Department housed these snacks in its offices.

"It was a joint effort," Anthony Greiter, the police department's Community Outreach Specialist, told MUNCHIES over the phone Tuesday afternoon, saying that the tweet in question was a two-hander between Greiter himself and a student employee. "After some discussion, we came to the determination that Chris probably needed to go to jail for this."

Greiter is still a bit flummoxed that the tweet has resonated with so many people. "I expected the tweet to be big, but not this big," he explained.

As for the taste of the “sandwich,” Jorgensen only took one bite, and it thankfully was pretty skimpy on cheese. “It was okay," he said. "Strawberry’s not really my favorite flavor. There wasn’t too much cheese, so I really dodged a bullet there.” If he were to hypothetically make this again, he doesn’t know what he'd change, for "there’s no combination that could be good” when it comes to Pop-Tarts and sliced cheese.

Noted!