Ice-Cream!

July 22nd, 2023| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN pronounced the other day:

America’s age-old love affair with ice cream appears to be winding down.”

Apparently the consumption of ice cream (not including froyo, sherbet, or even non-/low-fat varieties of the good stuff) has been falling for years.

In 1986, the average American ate 18 pounds of regular ice cream, according to the US Department of Agriculture. By 2021, the most recent year of the data, that was down a third to just 12 pounds per person.

Bronner:

For years, ice cream was more than a frozen dessert: It was a lifeline for American brewers during Prohibition and a means to boost morale among troops during World War II. By the 1950s, the sweet, creamy treat had become an American treasure.”

But like everything else that is delicious, ice-cream, too, has been subject to scrutiny for its impact both on human health and human environment. Everyone is becoming health conscious, making ice-cream consumption a rare treat to enjoy.

According to Matt Siegel, author of The Secret History of Food, there were a number of factors that propelled ice-cream into prominence in the last fifty years.

Prohibition, for one.

When alcohol became illegal, a lot of early American breweries turned to making ice cream. Both Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling started making the treat. Ice cream’s ingredients—fat, sugar—made a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions. Ice cream is the ultimate comfort food.”

As drinkers swapped a pint for a scoop, Prohibition became a boon for ice-cream makers.

World War II, for another. The government actually began using ice-cream to help boost sagging wartime morale.

Siegel again:

We built pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines, delivered individual ice cream cartons to foxholes and spent more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that patrolled the Pacific delivering ice cream. In 1946, the US produced the equivalent of 22.7 pounds of ice cream per person.”

Then came the interstate highway system and the abundance (and low price) of freezers.

But the thrill of a sundae or a cone from the days of yore is melting away, amid rising concerns of health and environment.

It also probably didn’t help that one man leading the charge against ice cream and dairy production was John Robbins, the one-time heir apparent to the Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream kingdom.

Said Robbins, as he walked away from the family business decades ago:

I was starting to believe that the more ice cream you ate, the more likely you were to have heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.”

And correspondingly, the USDA reports that low-fat and nonfat ice cream consumption has fared better from 1986 to 2021, rising from 6.1 pounds per person per year in 1986 to 6.4 pounds in 2021, according to the USDA’s data. Plus there is also a plethora of dessert options these days—cookies, candies, cake mixes, chocolates, pies, cheesecakes, etc.

Nonetheless, in 2022, dairy ice cream sales amounted to about $7 billion. So there is hope!

There may be hope, but two of the three Torah Psalms in the Psalter attest to the fact there is something far sweeter than ice-cream: God’s word!

More desirable than gold, even than much fine gold;
and sweeter than honey, even the flow [from] the honeycomb.
Psalm 19:10

How smooth to my palate is Your utterance,
more than honey [is] to my mouth.
Psalm 119:103

And it is healthy, too!

SOURCES: CNN