Do Not Buy: Nature Valley Soft Baked Oatmeal Peanut Butter Squares

There’s something bad ass about being barefoot at work and trading a pack of beef jerky for a snack bar belonging to someone else. I’ll do nearly anything to not commit to buying an entire box of something just to try one. Perhaps it feels something like a Snack Food Black Market. Surely trading in dried beef for a breakfast bar made from 100% natural whole grain oats is a nutritional upgrade, but who’s keeping track?

Nature Valley Soft Baked Oatmeal Squares look like a cookie on the box. Normally I don’t entertain oatmeal cookies because frankly they don’t entertain me. I associate them with dry lifeless little things. I don’t do raisins, so there are few versions that really get my attention, but here we are with the addition of peanut butter. While the next picture is a bit blurry, hopefully you can tell how small this oatmeal bar is. For 160 calories, it’s the same size as the most recently reviewed Fiber One brownie. I’m no expert in volumetrics, but wouldn’t I rather have two brownies than one of these things? I guess that depends to some degree on the taste.

I wish that I had something better to report about than the dryness of these bars. They had full sized hearty oats which really created a rough texture. Maybe this is what was meant by “whole grains”, because boy was I chewing. The taste of the peanut butter drizzle was both creamy and good, albiet a little dry on it’s own. As I ate, the topping flaked off and got to be a bit messy. The verdict? Stick with the dehydrated beef.