The Ice Cream Wars

Newsletter 2023-04-10

My oldest daughter, Betsy, is a month away from being a teenager. Cue the dramatic music and perhaps a few thunderbolts. Toss in a blood-curdling scream in the distance for good measure. Her changing worldviews are in line with the number of times she's been around the earth. Suddenly, she's ashamed of the only place she's ever lived. I mean our suburb, not our house specifically, although she probably has enough pre-teenage angst to cover both. By the time I was her age, I had resided in six different homes spread across two states and four towns. Her biggest move was when we transformed her crib into a toddler bed and pushed it down the hall. We didn't even have to pay any friends with free beer and pizza. Betsy isn't a quitter. My greatest fear is that her newfound unhappiness with her hometown is a permanent state of mind rather than a passing phase. Soon, she'll head off to college, where she might fall in love with a person or place that could anchor her elsewhere for good. I'm now on a quest to make her appreciate the place where she's growing up. That means cramming in all the great childhood memories I can before she's no longer a child. It has nothing to do with how much money I spend or even what experiences I have to offer. After careful analysis, I realized whether or not Betsy sticks around later in life will depend on one substance and one substance alone. No, it's not booze, although that's a close second in any good Catholic family. Number one, of course, will always be ice cream. The flavor doesn't matter, but the ambiance does. It all comes down to the tale behind it. If I want Betsy in my life as an adult, the end of her origin story will have to be heavy on frozen heavy whipping cream. Otherwise she'll be gone for good.

Ice cream is the foundation of all positive childhood memories and of human happiness in general. (My condolences to those in the lactose intolerant community. Being born unable to handle ice cream is like being born without a soul.) All ice cream leads to joy but not always to equally great recollections. The formula is that the more inconvenient ice cream is to get, the greater the impression it will make in your brain for the rest of your life. Some of my wife's fondest childhood memories are of eating homemade ice cream at her grandparents' house. Getting it was an entire production. They had to pull out the ice cream maker, fill it with ice, and run the thing with a small nuclear generator. Appliances in the 1980s used a lot more power than they do today. They didn't have top tier flavors like chocolate chip cookie dough back then, either. Their options were vanilla and vanilla-er. Knowing Lola, she probably picked regular vanilla. If she liked excitement in her life, she never would have married me. If you ask her today, Lola will swear up and down that it was the best ice cream in the history of the world. It's her personal truth but also an objective lie. She's been blinded by nostalgia.

Modern ice cream has been custom designed by top food scientists to be biologically impossible to put down. That's why noticing that your bowl of rocky road is empty feels roughly on par with losing a loved one. It's precision crafted on an industrial scale to make sure every single batch is identically capable of hooking you like potato chips mixed with crack. You can buy this semi-solid of the gods for pennies per pound in any grocery store in America, but that's too easy. Nobody has a lifelong memory of the time their mom went to Meijer for a regular gallon of regular ice cream that they served as a regular dessert. There has to be a story to go with it. Otherwise the closest you'll get to seeing your kid again is one video call a year at Christmas.

We had a special ice cream place in the town where I spent most of my childhood. Every municipality in America does. We all swear our hometown ice cream place is one-of-a-kind, but they're all exactly the same. They serve the same mass produced ice cream made in the same six ice cream factories, except for the ones that make their own. Those use ingredients from the same six wholesale ingredient distributors mixed in the same ratios. I've had ice cream at two places that even milk their own cows, and I still couldn't tell you the difference between that and the stuff I get from the grocery store. It's possible (okay, certain) that my taste buds are broken, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. All ice cream everywhere is the same. The one exception, of course, is the ice cream parlor in your hometown, which is the only one in the world that's truly unique. Just don't ever hold a blind taste test with their stuff against ice cream from literally any place else.

Photo by Slashio Photography on Unsplash

Growing up, our unique, one-of-a-kind, totally original ice cream place was special because it didn't have a drive-through. That's seriously all that said it apart. Being forced to get out of your car to stand in line to order made it inconvenient enough to stick out in the minds of children who grew up to be adults who passed on that shared inconvenience to children of their own. Tradition is just another name for an annoyance that spans the generations. An elderly neighbor at one of the three houses where I lived in that city claimed he knew the guy who started our local ice cream shop and tried to discourage him from the no-drive through gimmick. My neighbor's only mistake was treating human beings as logical. It turns out people love to be mistreated. Giving them what they want as easily as possible is a sure way to make them hate it.

That's why I failed in my previous attempts to trick my kids into good memories with ice cream. When we went to Chicago for a weekend trip, I organized an ice cream bar at my friend Greg's house. I figured the kids would forget every game they played at the world's largest arcade and every exhibit they saw at one of the world's best museums, but they would forever remember the frozen dairy products we gave them the night in between. Once again, I miscalculated. By having everything laid out right in front of them, I made it too easy, sending them the subconscious signal that I was treating them to actual garbage. They've already forgotten that night and the extra ten million calories of pure sugar I let them eat in place of dinner. That's not the kind of thing that will keep my oldest daughter from moving away forever. One more lackluster ice cream bar and she's as good as gone.

I came closer to the mark in Kentucky. Continuing on my recent mission to make friends at the most inappropriate times possible, I struck up a conversation with a random dude in the hotel hot tub. He raved about an ice cream place a few minutes down the interstate, which served frozen confections in portions so large they had to use a trench shovel. I told the girls about it, and their eyes lit up. They were way more excited about that than touring the largest and most impressive cave system on the planet. We hurriedly got dressed and rushed through dinner to get to the day's main event: dessert. The ice cream place did indeed offer large quantities, as promised by my uncomfortable hot tub friend. It even had flights of ice cream so you could sample a little bit of everything. But a little bit of everything tasted exactly like a little bit of everything from everywhere else. They dispelled even a hint of magic with a sign on the wall explaining where they got their ice cream. It was a brand I had never heard of but that was apparently available by the gallon in grocery stores all over Ohio. Of course, we weren't in Ohio, which made it special, and by special, I mean more expensive. Still, the kids got to pick out their own flavors, and we had to go someplace in particular to eat them, so it will hopefully stand out as moderately memorable. At the very least, it was cheaper than our cave tour, and far less traumatic. Next time, I'll just drive to an Ohio grocery store and skip the underground wonders. I'll buy my children's love yet.

I won't be pulling that off with the hometown ice cream place in the suburb where we live now. Every year, it opens on the first day of spring, and the crowds are incredible. They seem fully unaware that we have no fewer than two grocery stores within a mile radius with freezer sections open year-round. People need to wait in line for this specific ice cream on this specific day because that's what their parents did and their parents before them going all the way back to the days of Moses. Let my people go and also give me two scoops of chocolate swirl. This year, however, our local ice cream place mixed things up by not opening at all. When the news broke, our community was on the brink of collapse. It's a small step from an ice cream shortage to outright cannibalism. The problem with this shortage was that it wasn't a shortage at all. Besides our two grocery stores, we have numerous fast food and sit down restaurants, all of which have ice cream on their dessert menus. We also have another dedicated ice cream place, but people don't form traditions around it because it's a national chain and is open year-round, which negates its specialness. (Correction: It's closed in January, when the family that owns the local franchise goes on vacation for an entire month. In my opinion, that's a mistake. Don't sleep on New Year's Eve ice cream. Literally. That sugar rush will help you stay up past midnight one night a year.) We have more ice cream options than perhaps any other civilization in human history, yet people can't stop going on and on about this blow to local culinary culture. We can still get frozen treats, but they won't generate any positive childhood memories for my girls. That doesn't help me at all.

Friday night, Betsy wanted ice cream. That's more or less a constant side effect of being alive. The difference is this time she became proactive about it. Yet another chain ice cream place opened a few years ago, this one extremely close to our house. In fact, you could hit it with a rock from our property. I know that's an idiom, but in this case, it's literally true. Well, maybe not for me, but for a regular dude with a normal level of upper body strength and hand-eye coordination. Yet, despite this proximity, we'd never gone for the ten thousand reasons I already outlined. Betsy's request this time was novel because she wanted this trip to be just her and her sisters. They would spend their own money and handle the entire transaction by themselves. My first instinct was to say no, which is what I blurted out. The time delay between my brain and my mouth is non-existent. It was a waste of money, and we had grocery store ice cream in our house. Then I remembered that it wasn't about ice cream at all. It was about independence and making memories. I let them go.

This is the part where a bunch of people freak out because I let my children leave my side unsupervised. Clearly, my kids shouldn't be out of my direct line of sight until their early 40s. Nonetheless, I allowed them to risk death to lay the seeds for future nostalgia. Then I waited. Ten minutes later, they ran back through my front door with an epic tale to tell. They had arrived at the ice cream place right at closing time. The teenager behind the counter took their order. Then, he started trying to unload free ice cream. Apparently they make it "fresh" everyday, and, at closing time, just toss out whatever they have left. He offered my kids an entire tub of ice cream for free. Mae said no. She regrets that decision to this day. I have no doubt it will still haunt her on her deathbed. Then the teen offered the kids two extra large cups filled to the top with free ice cream. This time, they had the situational awareness to accept. They came home holding the extra ice cream aloft like they had just slayed a wooly mammoth. I have never seen them so proud of themselves. They offered one extra cup to me and one to my wife. They were the providers now. It was the single greatest moment of their lives and easily dwarfed everything I've ever spent money on for them. They had done this themselves (with the allowance I pay them for the chores they don't do) and it had paid off massively. Based on how excited they were that night, they'll still be telling their grandkids about this. Now, when Betsy grows up, she'll talk about how she always used to walk to the ice cream store on the corner, even if this is the only time she ever does it. She has one cool memory to offset all her pre-teen dissatisfaction with where we live. Will that be enough to keep her from going to a distant college and then staying away for good? Time will tell. As for me, I'm going to up her allowance so she can afford more overpriced ice cream.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Catch you next time.

James