Nostalgia says things were always better when you were a child.
Sometimes that is objectively true. McDonald's french fries were better, for example, before shoddy epidemiology and progressive anti-meat mullahs declared that everything had to be cooked in vegetable oil.(1)
But ice cream? I do not look back fondly at the rare ice cream cone I got melting all over my hand. Science optimized ice cream a lot since then. Some disagree it is for the better but is it just food fundamentalism, a new way to virtue signal for the artisinal organic food crowd, or do they have a point?
FDA Standards of Identity used to mean something. Kraft once got sued because advertising how much milk it used might suggest how much calcium their cheese had. Now, you can crush a nut and call it "milk" without any scrutiny at all.(2)
If you are cheap, like me, or had sons who could eat a quart of ice cream per day, like me, you may have instead opted for 'frozen dessert' or 'ice milk.' Ice cream has a legal definition so on frozen desserts they have different verbiage, even if the package art may look similar.
The irony of ice cream when I was young and we were poor is that we only had it in the winter. We didn't have an ice machine but there was plenty of ice and snow outside in January. There was also rock salt everywhere to cause the ice to melt outside the canister and 'draw out' the heat. We couldn't afford dairy cows (if my parents had a good year, we raised a steer to sell) but there were dairy farms all around us so milk was plentiful. And we could make our own cream by adding butter back into milk if we had store-bought stuff. That's all it took. You put in the dairy, vanilla extract, and sugar and then stayed out in the freezing cold cranking a handle for 30 minutes and you had ice cream. In the winter.
Those are in the ingredients in ice cream, as flawed and glorious as it was. Even then there were alternatives.(2) They used less milk and didn't call it ice cream.
I ridiculed this marketing and was told I didn't understand the science because I stated that calories matter, not the type of calories. People would trot out shoddy epidemiology based on food frequency questionnaires. Just like a lot of food and chemistry posturing is done today. Meanwhile, I remain correct, in 100 percent of clinical trials that is the only thing certain to work.
They instead called it health food, thanks to the same junk epidemiology that has people claiming food coloring is bad today. Epidemiologists correlated fat and cholesterol to heart disease. Dairy was out, "light" was in. Including with ice cream. Which is a treat, not a food staple.
In the immortal Richard Donner classic "Scrooged", John Glover played Brice Cummings as the archetype of the hip coastal elite that a decade later would deny vaccines and start buying organic shampoo.
Science was the future. Now even some chemists are dessert purists. Dr. Dep Pearlman says the problem is Big Food while ironically endorsing Ben & Jerry's, a brand of Unilever, the world's largest food company, until they spun all ice cream off as a separate unit because desserts are not a large enough market.(4)
He laments the inclusion of corn syrup and gums in modern ice cream but that may be where nostalgia is at play. Old-timey ice cream was wildly inconsistent. In my great-grandmother's recipe book the homemaker is instructed to use peanut butter fresh from the fire.(5) Modern peanut butter is also better in every way.
But you may feel like ice cream that doesn't require a hammer and chisel to get out of the carton is a bad thing, so you dislike "double-churned" nomenclature. It has more air. In my estimation, if your big concern is the density of your ice cream, it is not a treat, you eat way too much of it. On rare occasions when I buy it, I want to take it out of the freezer and be able to put some in a bowl - not set a timer and wait an hour so a spoon doesn't bend.
Stabilizers and gums and, yes, air, make ice cream better. Dr. Pearlman calls this "encrapification" but he can clearly afford to spend $15 a pint for Graeter’s. Poor people can't, and targeting dessert is no different than when activists used to target baby formula and insist all women breastfeed - mommy shaming by nutritonal activists and influencers that it ended up being a disaster when the overzealous Biden administration shuttered domestic baby formula plants without recognizing that the American government prohibited imported alternatives identical in every way - because they hadn't spent $1 billion and 15 years to get FDA approval.
He suggests this is corporate malfeasance rather than optimization. I do not agree, because I represent the 98 percent who can't afford Häagen-Dazs. Trader Joe's 'two buck Chuck' (Charles Shaw wine) is a much smaller bottle than it was decades ago. It's affordable, just less of it. They can still get it. Wealthy people may complain but why are they buying it?
I look at ice cream, whether it is below the FDA threshold for "ice cream" or not, as a treat I want to be affordable for poor kids. It makes parents feel like heroes and kids still love it.
Forty years from now, they will even insist it tasted better than the stuff on shelves in 2066.
NOTE:
(1) Trans fats were also promoted as superior before the same demographic that demanded they exist wanted them banned, claiming they cause diabetes. Their cousins in energy predatort groups also promoted hydroelectric power, natural gas, and ethanol before turning on those once they got popular to be worth suing.
(2) Thanks, Obama.
(3) Made by Sealtest. It isn't around now but the company was once so ubiquitous that Martin Luther King, Jr. lumped it in with the best-known brand in the world for boycotts: "Go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk."
(4) You know you are a big company when Breyer's, Ben & Jerry's, Magnum, etc. are too small a segment to care about.
(5) Have you made your own peanut butter? Within an hour you will have a layer of oil on top. And you will have to stir it all back in, but no amount of re-stirring will make it consistent again.
