Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Ice Cream

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why ice cream is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Ice cream. Known for being scream-worthy. Famous for all of us screaming! Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hi. Hello. And surprise to listeners, we hung out recently. We hung out. I hung out with Alex and his wife. Yeah, I hung out with Katie and her husband. Yes. And we realized, hey, we're all real people. And we realized, hey, we're all real people.

Yeah, none of us is some sort of chat GPT with a computer animated face and upper body attached. So that's good. Yeah. Alex always talking about his wife like, oh, yes, your wife from Canada, you say. No, she's from Texas. But yeah, no, wife is real. No, she's from Texas. But yeah, no, wife is real. Wife is not like a vacuum cleaner with a face drawn on it with arms made out of PVC pipe.

And she's great. Right. Not like the one before. Yeah, that's right. The ex. You mean my ex. Katie and her husband, they very nicely included us in the trip to the u.s and and our cats hung out with them and so anyway the best cats i've ever seen in the entire world and universe uh including my own cats that i had when i was a kid now i love my own cats but these

cats are special they're special cats cats. Watson is he has celebrity vibes. He's the most friendly, like, cool chill cat I have ever seen. He's beautiful. His tail is the fluffiest tail ever. And Birdie is this, like, sleek

and awesome, just little forest spirit who pops around. And she's also friendly, but she just kind of, like, tele around. And she's also friendly. But she just kind of like teleports. And it's great. He's got like a teleporting cat and a celebrity cat. And it was great. And I loved meeting those cats.

These are my favorite descriptions of them. I think Birdie was even found in a forest in real life. But anyway, we decided to just hang out. We didn't like make content out of it. But I don't know. Stories may come up of us hanging out. You didn't make content out of it. I was secretly recording the whole thing. It's mostly Watson purring. That's most of the audio.

Like faint human voices in the background. Yes. No, it was very fun. Very cool to see Alex. Yeah. Now we're back to taping like we do. And Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the one thing I could eat basically a billion amounts of was ice cream. And I love, you know, most types of ice cream. Frozen yogurt is a sham. It is a fraudulent ice cream. I don't associate with frozen yogurt. Are those fighting words in Southern California, your origin point? with frozen yogurt. Are those fighting words in Southern California, your origin point? Yeah, there was tons of frozen yogurt places in Southern California, and it is ridiculous. Like,

I think there's this joke in that TV show, The Good Place, and they're like joking about how like frozen yogurt is like if you take ice cream, this perfect thing and just make it, you know, not as good. So I love ice cream. Of course, here in Italia, ice cream is called gelato. And it's still very good. And I like gelato. It's I don't know how different it is from ice cream in terms of the chemical composition. I think it's pretty similar, but yeah, delicious, not super nutritious, maybe a little nutritious, but I love it. Ice cream all the way.

Yeah, I agree. And yeah, they're pretty much the same thing in a way we'll talk about ice cream and gelato, but I think I had a similar childhood relationship to it. Picky eater could eat a whole carton of ice cream if asked and well and allowed and welcomed. And really that and cookies, my favorite desserts. Yes. The only limits on my ice cream consumption are got to hydrate. And there's an eventual upper limit that I will risk all the time. I'm like Icarus, you know? Right. Flew too close to the ice cream sun. Um, yeah, no, I, uh, I'm, so I'm even lactose intolerant and I ignore that. And I, I do use lactate pills all the time. It's like when people find out I'm lactose intolerant, it's like, oh, that's too bad. You can't eat ice cream. I'm like, oh, you don't know me. You don't know my determination, my spirit, my willingness to fight for ice cream. Yeah, I just take a

lactate pill. It works pretty good. Right. Just sticking that into your mechanical Icarus wings, like, doesn't matter. I got this. I literally carry a little metal pod of lactate pills everywhere I go. Yeah. Just in case ice cream happens. My wife does, too. Because, yeah, gotta have it. Yeah.

Your vacuum cleaner with PVC pipe arms wife or the real wife? There's a compartment. Yeah, that's right. Right. That's the one reason vacuums can't have ice cream. It's the lactose. Otherwise. Yeah. System works great. Doesn't come anything up.

Suck that right up. We'll talk in a little bit about the volume and density of ice cream. I remember when I went from grocery store ice cream with more air into it to like Ben and Jerry's with less air into it. I was shocked and I felt like I had less ice cream consumption ability. It's just because it's a more dense ice cream. But I was like, what happened to me? I could eat this forever. What's wrong? Yeah. Yeah. No, I, oh my God. I have issues with Halo Top ice cream, but we could get into that later when we talk about ice cream density. ice cream, but we could get into that later when we talk about ice cream density. This brings us straight in. And right before that, thank you to DaCoopBear on the Discord.

Thank you to PeanutsInitiative on the Discord. Also, thank you to Cleomancer for supporting them. This was a very popular pick by listeners and supporters of the show. And it makes sense why, because everybody loves it. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... iStats, youStats, we allStats for numbers. Listeners, you won't believe how many times it took me to get that. It's very ingrained to say scream, which makes it

make sense. I said, I was like, wait, Alex, no, I got it this time, but I didn't. I didn't got it that time. Hey, we're making musical magic over Zoom, you know? There we go. Yeah. Let's see the greats do that, right? The Beatles could never. Let's see

the Beatles get on Zoom and do I am the walrus or whatever it is they do. And that name was submitted by Peanuts Initiative on the Discord who co-suggested this topic. And new name for this segment every week, please make a Massillion Wacking Bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sithpod. gmail.com. But the first number is what we were talking about. The number is 30 to 50%. 30 to 50% of modern ice cream is made of air, even the good kind. Hey, I've been scammed. I'm paying for air this whole time. That's right. And I want to make it a mini takeaway because takeaway number one, Right. And I want to make it a mini takeaway because takeaway number one.

A huge percentage of your ice cream is air, which is a scam and is totally necessary. Like there has to be air, but some companies ramp it up. Right. I can lick air for free and do often. Right. Dogs do it. We learn it from them. That's just the way it works. Yeah. You must be on to something. My little dog's licking air. I'm like, hey, let me get on all of that. I want to try that. One of many sources here is the American Chemical Society, a U.S. nonprofit scientific org. They say between 30 to 50 percent of a carton of ice cream made in the U.S. purchased here will contain air. And that's on purpose. Like the necessary part of this is that ice cream makers have to aerate the ice cream

to keep it fluffy enough to eat, make it taste creamy and have a not too solid texture that we like. So some air is necessary for the flavor experience we want. Like, it's not simply a scam. It's also simply necessary. Okay. All right. I mean, I guess air is good in general. Yeah. And like, even the fancy kind will have at least 25 or 30% air. It's even though you really don't feel that way when you're having that like solid or

custardy or French pot kind of experience. Yeah. But I mean, I guess it makes sense like if it's just frozen milk it's gonna be kind of a uh tough experience right it'll just be a block like like ice cream doesn't feel totally solid partly because there's air in a way that helps right it's good we're not looking for a we're not looking for a milk popsicle. That's not really appetizing, is it? There's like paletas that are that, but in a good way. Like ice cream in a Scoopy thingy.

No, I don't want that. It's not a solid popsicle. Yeah. Yeah. And also, it turns out a lot of us have kind of tested what happens when you remove more air from your ice cream. Because if you let ice cream melt, right, it goes into a liquid form. Yeah. And then a lot of the air escapes.

So anybody who's ever seen their ice cream melt and tried to refreeze it and eat it, you are experimenting with decreasing the air in your ice cream. And that's most of why refrozen ice cream tastes horrible and tastes way worse, especially texture wise. It's a mockery of ice cream. I learned this as a kid when I'd scoop myself way too much ice cream. It's not that I couldn't eat it all. It's that I couldn't eat it all at the rate required to eat it all before it melted. And so I'd be like, well, that's a waste of ice cream.

I should refreeze it. And I'd do that. And it was, you know, just, it's the most disappointment a child can feel. Right. Especially Southern California. What a difficult proving ground for the eating of ice cream, right? It's warm. It's sunny. Oh boy. Yeah. Gotta hurry. Gotta hurry. That's, that's what they say. That's sort of the, that's the Southern California motto. Like we got to hurry with this ice cream and also surf. that's the Southern California motto. Like we got to hurry with this ice cream and also surf.

How am I going to catch the waves and eat ice cream at the same time? Oh, this hectic life. Oh boy. And also FYI for people, there are bacteria risks. Also, if you let ice cream melt and then eat it later.

So just like probably don't bother for all the reasons. But yeah, that air is necessary. And then a lot of companies will add extra air to save money, right? Like air is cheaper than all of the ingredients of ice cream. And the industry even uses a term for that air to suggest it's not on purpose. The industry term for air in ice cream is overrun. And overrun is a term to imply like, whoops, we put some extra air. That's not on purpose or a cost cutting or a trick. And, you know, there's there's companies out there that probably sell you cheaper ice cream if they add a lot of air, but also it does save them money if they do it the right way. Yeah, that's interesting because like there is, you know, those big tubs of ice cream in the

plastic tubs, like I don't know if those are so much a thing anymore, but I remember when I was a kid, my mom would get those. They were just these big plastic tubs, full ice cream. It was never as good as the Ben and Jerry's. Part of that is probably the quality of ingredients, but also just the eating experience. I think that was just sort of very like, I'm barely getting any ice cream in this mouthful. And then of course, the audacity of Halo Top to market itself as a healthier ice cream because it's just got more air in it. Exactly. They use stevia and fiber and enormous amounts of air. Yeah.

It's physically lighter than other ice cream. Air is lighter than the ingredients. I don't know. I don't know about that. It's like saying like, we've just invented a new healthy potato chip and it's a bag and there's just three chips in there. It's like most of the bag is air. Truly. Yeah. That's the exact other grocery store item I thought of was bags of chips where it's like, oh, this isn't all Doritos. That's that's like ice cream. But you wouldn't know because it appears contiguous. It appears like a solid full carton. It's airflation. And yeah, and this is such a thing. Countries like the U.S. regulate what you can call ice cream by weight and volume. Oh, interesting. To be a gallon of U.S. ice cream, you have to weigh at least 4.5 pounds.

Huh. And the volume has to be no more than 50% air. Like that 50 is an upper limit. Otherwise you have to call it something else. Just call it frozen milk air. Yeah, there's some UK regulations where they decrease the dairy and call it milk ice instead of ice cream. Like there's a lot of different countries

with different labeling and there are also actual legal terms in U.S. ice cream like premium and super premium. Those are meaningful in terms of the amount of milk and the amount of air. That's actually a legal definition. Oh, I see. And yeah. And in terms of regulations, milk is the other main thing you have to have. And in the U, an ice cream has to be at least 10% milk fat to be labeled ice cream. And even the cheapest ice creams are usually doing that too. It was sort of hard to find examples of any products that are completely air and no milk. You don't need to put a lot of the right things in for it to be ice creamy.

I once had, I think it was a milk-free ice cream. Maybe it had milk in it, but it was de-lactosinated. And lactose-free ice cream can be very good. Yeah, totally. But this was not. It was, quote unquote, protein enriched, and it tasted like mud. So yeah, that wasn't any good. One of the humongousnesses of this topic is how many ways people can make awesome vegan ice cream or all sorts of different compositions of ice cream. We won't get way into exact ingredient levels, but in general, ice cream is made of cream, milk, sugar, and some kind of flavoring. If it's made with eggs, that's usually described as a custard base ice cream. And there's artificial colorings, pasteurization, toppings and stuff. The key production step is churning. That's the main thing that makes all of that into an ice creamy kind of

experience. But it's a lot of minor variation in this like gelato is basically ice cream, a lot of minor variation in this. Like gelato is basically ice cream, but a style of ice cream with maybe more milk, maybe less cream, generally no egg yolks. Like it's really not that different from ice cream. There's just a range of styles that people are doing. Yeah. Yeah. I think in terms of the flavor experience, gelato melts faster than ice cream. It's a little less solid than ice cream. It's a little silkier, I think, than ice cream. I like both. And I like both gelato and ice cream. I don't really have a favorite.

I think they're both very good, but just, you know, ever so slightly different. That's right. From a what the ingredients are perspective, it's the same. There's just, it's just like a, it's almost like the different pizzas in different cities or something, you know? Yeah. To bring it to another Italian topic. Here I am.

Italy and New York. Wow. Amazing. Mamma mia. As they say. And getting into different stuff. The next number here is about 6 000 years wow about 6 000 years that's one estimate for the age of frozen treats eaten by humans

but this is also not debunking a myth but like debunking away some internet headlines are written when you research this kind of thing, you find people saying like, ice cream is 6,000 years old. And what that means is ancient people ate some stuff where you like flavor snow and ice or throw some dairy into something. But like, that's very different. It's more of an ancient slurpee, really. One of the main examples is there are stories of Alexander the

Great. Oh, hey, a person we've talked about a lot. In the 300s BC, he would enjoy a treat where they added honey and fruit to pieces of snow, which is cool. You know, honey and fruit in snow. It's basically a snow cone or something, but there's no dairy. There's no churning. That's not the thing we're talking about. It's kind of a granite or slushy snow cone, whatever you want to call it, but it's not ice cream. Yeah. And globally, there's lots of kinds of things like this. And really the two things to know about ancient stories of frozen treats is that people could make them before we had modern refrigeration. And also almost everybody eating this was mega wealthy. You had to be very rich and powerful to enjoy a frozen treat outside of an extremely cold climate. Yeah, because you'd have to like import big chunks of ice, right? Yeah. And in some other regions, they would like send servants up mountains

to get snow. And you know, it was a really laborious, you basically needed an entire household staff or more or enslaved people. And you also needed structures, like BBC Science Focus says wealthy people for thousands of years have built what they called ice houses, which is a whole building for straw-lined underground pits that keep ice cool or some other kind of cooling cellar system. And basically everybody couldn't do that. Most of these ancient frozen treat stories are literally kings and emperors having that. I'm imagining like before they figured out the infrastructure, they sent some poor servant up to get snow and they come back and it's like, I told you to get snow, not water. And the servant's like, I don't know what to tell you,

man. Didn't you take middle school science? No. What are all of those things? No. What are all of those things? 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, what's everything? And yeah, a lot of those treats were based on send people to a very cold place where the climate will generate some frozen water, which is, again, just so different to me from an industry or household making ice cream. It's just night and day. And there's one exception, I would say. It's an Inuit food called Akatak that we'll talk about in the bonus and is amazing. Other than that one, most of the frozen treats from thousands of years ago are adding some flavor to some snow and a bunch of laborers doing it for a few rich people.

Yeah. adding some flavor to some snow and a bunch of laborers doing it for a few rich people. This era also gives us some of the words we use. Food historian Sarah Lohman says the ancient Near East made flavored shaved ice, and they called that sherbati. Huh. That word gave us sherbet, gave us sorbet. But again, this is like a Mughal emperor in India enjoying this. The rest of the people didn't have it because they didn't have a whole household staff to climb into, I guess, the Himalayas and go get them some snow. So is there a difference between sorbet or

sherbet? I always thought sorbet was just the fancier kind of sherbet, or is there another difference? And sometimes they're labeled funny, but sherbet usually has dairy. I see. And then sorbet does not. I see. We're touching on the world of fruity ice, but we're touching on it because it's like slightly different, I think, than especially the U.S. understanding of the ice cream topic where we love cows and we love milk. We do love cows and their milk. I don't know if cows necessarily love us, though, because all the milk we're stealing for our ice cream, it's like, that's for my baby. It's like, no, this is for my ice cream now.

Yeah, I'm on a break between surfing. So this is for me. So do we freeze the cow first or later? First, chocolatify the cow. That's how we get chocolate milk. Then. Right. Yeah. Chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Ice cream comes from cold cows. That's how we get chocolate milk then right uh yeah chocolate milk comes from brown cows right ice cream comes from cold cows that's how it works right pink cow for strawberry this is all elementary stuff i don't we don't need to cover this basic biology learn it when that uh that like super rich economic situation really lasted into the mid-1800s, even kind of into the early 1900s. A lot of the first stories of a dairy-based iced treat in Europe are about 1600s Italian nobility. The very first stories of Americans enjoying ice cream are slave-owning presidents.

It's Thomas Jefferson. It's George Washington. It's the absolute richest and most powerful Americans. You don't really picture our founding fathers just sitting there licking a little ice cream cone, but there they were. Yeah, and no cones either, but Thomas Jefferson... Just in their bare hands, holding a lump of ice cream, licking it out of their hands like an animal, Alex.

Let's put that on them. I don't like them very much. So, yeah, because, yeah, Thomas Jefferson got his ice cream recipe from the French royal court interpersonally. And and then he made enslaved people make it for him. He made enslaved people make it for him. And the long ago vanilla episode, we talked about James Hemmings, the brother of Sally Hemmings, who was Jefferson's ice cream cook and forced to work there. And there's also a fun number here, which is two, because two is the number of consecutive years where George Washington tried to set up a home ice system and it all melted. Love it.

Great. Take that, George. What a d***. In 1784, there are letters from Washington to his friend Robert Morris complaining about how all his stored ice melted in the new system he tried to set up at Mount Vernon. And then Morris replies with advice, with how-to tips, and then further letters from Washington the following year, describing himself as, quote, lurched by his messed up melted ice system. And yet again, he can't have ice cream or ice because it didn't work right. Yeah, that must be hard because he's got the perfect teeth for it, too.

Because, like, with wooden teeth, you can't get the teeth hurt from ice cream. I doubt they figured out how to attach nerves to the wood. Wait, did he actually have wooden teeth or is that a lie? Is that a myth? Apparently they were mostly ivory and not, but it's the idea of false teeth or, you know, inserting teeth. Yeah. Yeah.

I think if he had false teeth, I don't know that that would conduct to the to the nerve root and so you could definitely get a lot of ice cream in there without your your teeth hurting yeah embarrassing though that it's done with slavery like hey we need to dehumanize an entire group of people why because we Because we like Ice Queen. Right. Like they were the Americans who had the resources, people. Washington had this experience between winning the American Revolution and later becoming president.

That interperiod where he was, they like tried to make him king and he was saying no. Meanwhile, he was messing around with his ice house and being mad about it like a home improvement guy. Yeah, it's just kind of embarrassing. Really weird. And then one other number about Rich Fulks is the year 1904, because that's the approximate invention year of ice cream cones. 1904. Ah, did we try other shapes first? Did we try like a Taurus ice cream box? Right. Tell your medieval servant, why isn't it a Taurus? And they're like, I haven't even read the Bible. I don't know things. Here is my waffled ice cream rhombus. Nobody bought it. The ice cream cone happens long after not just ice cream, but other frozen treats that you could plausibly put in one.

And it's because until around then, ice cream was pretty exclusive to the extraordinarily wealthy. pretty exclusive to the extraordinarily wealthy. Like there were Americans homemaking it in the second half of the 1800s, but nobody was out and about having ice cream until the early 1900s. Rich people ate it from luxurious containers like glass bowls, and then servants would wash and care for that. Yeah, or lapped it from the hands of their servants. Right, like our filthy first and third presidents. Yeah.

No manners. And there's actually several people claiming to be the inventor of ice cream cones. But almost all the stories center on the 1904 exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. The Louisiana Purchase World Exposition, it was called. And that was one of the first situations where the general public was eating ice cream on the go. Yeah. So that's around when we got this. Yeah, this sounds familiar because it was like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like they were trying to figure out a way to sort of get this out to people in a way in like a disposable type cup.

But then they were like, hey, you could also eat it and it would hold the ice cream good. And that's, that's how I remember that story going. And then it, they created the best thing, which is so much better than a cup. I'm sorry for a cup heads out there who love ice cream in a cup. The cone is so good, a properly create like, and I'm not talking about like the styrofoam mass produced cones. I'm talking about a legit styrofoam mass-produced cones i'm talking about a legit waffle cone uh freshly made waffle cone that is the premium ice cream experience in my opinion it's quite good i i'm gonna link a really fun book but it's called serendipity and it's by oscar farinetti who's the founder of the Eataly chain of restaurants in the U.S.

Oh, you know what's funny? They have Eataly stores here in Italy. I didn't think they'd do that. Yeah, I didn't think they would be so bold, but they got them here. He is Italian. I'm OK with it. Yeah. No, I mean, like I've heard that the stuff in there is like legit good.

I think there's fresh produce. I'm not fancy enough to go. I go to the Carrefour, which is, you know, for us peons, non-fancy people. But yeah, I've heard the Italy stores are actually quite good. Right. The plebeians, not the patricians is what I know from Roman history. Yeah, sure. It's all just still Roman, right?

It's pillars and marble and cool. Great. Yeah, he in his book, he interviews Arnaldo Minetti, who runs a family owned cone making company in Bergamo. They talk about a few different claimants to inventing the ice cream cone, and also talk about how it was kind of a forerunner of sustainable packaging. Like you bake it and eat it and then you can grow more things to make more cones. And it's oddly environmentally pioneering, even though the main idea was paper's kind of expensive. We aren't giving people glass bowls. And the various legends often involve some baker, like thinking of pressing this stuff into wafers and then wrapping it up.

Yeah, because the only trash can involved is your tummy, which I love. My favorite trash can, me. Yeah, and these cones, they kind of become like ice cream, where people develop their specific styles, specific high or low quality. I've seen ice cream cones with toppings built into them. It's sort of evolved with ice cream, but only since really recently, only since the last 120 years. And I like that it makes the ice cream the people's cream.

The cone is the vessel for the people's ice cream. It's kind of like the hammer and sickle, except for ice cream. And it's delicious and not as controversial. When I Google Soviet themed ice cream shop, I'm going to get results. And it's going to be really fun. Shout out to whatever puns they've generated. And there's one last number here this week. Speaking of them, the number is 1921.

Year 1921. That is a year when U.S. immigration agents at Ellis Islands began a program of offering ice cream products to new immigrants as a first treat and meal in America. Wow. 21. Wow. 21. The U.S. has such a sordid history of welcoming immigrants and are kind of especially when it comes to like, say, arbitrary delineations along the lines of race and where you come from. That's so sweet. Like, man, I wish that was always the case.

like man I wish that was always the case you know like you got when you got the Statue of Liberty she's like hey give me your poor you're tired give me everybody and then she's holding what I used to think was an ice cream cone as a child turns out it's

a torch less cool but as a little kid I'm like she's holding a giant ice cream cone and she's welcoming people and I'm I say we she's holding a giant ice cream cone and she's welcoming people. And I say we should make that torch an ice cream cone and give it to immigrants who come to our country. That's awesome. I love it. Yeah.

Like this, this was explicitly intended to give that message. Not specifically the canon stuff, but the statue. But like, welcome. You mean the Statue of Liberty? The torch was an ice cream cone? I knew it. Yeah, one key source this week is a really cool book. It's called The Secret History of Food by food writer Matt Siegel.

And he cites 1921 news reports with headlines like, Ellis Island authorities gently lead immigrants to appreciation of good points of America by introducing them to the pleasures of ice cream sandwiches. Wow. The sub headline was ice cream as Americanization agent. And an ice cream sandwich Americanized me as a kid. Sure. Like rad.

What a cool country that we had this. Yeah. Just like we stick people in reeducation camps and just start giving them ice cream. Right. But you can't leave. It's like hell Homer with the donuts, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Homer Simpson. I would thrive in that environment. I want all nationalistic propaganda to just be like, we've got a good dessert. Huh? Huh? My favorite part of this article he cites, they essentially say that they say, quote, who could imagine a man who is genuinely fond of ice cream becoming a Bolshevik?

Even strawberry ice cream would arouse no latent anarchistic tendencies while vanilla or peach would be soothing to the very reddest of the reds so take that and if folks if i don't know if folks remember the timeline of the russian revolution it had just happened like this isn't a whole long cold war where we're finally thinking of this that was an immediate idea was we will defeat Russian communism with ice cream. You see, the coldness of the ice cream speaks of the coldness of Siberia where the work camps are. And thus anyone thinking of maybe being a little bit communist will be like, wait a minute. Right.

No. I choose this coldness. Also, only capitalism could produce ice cream. No other system. Yeah. And the truth and total falseness of that claim is what we're going to dive into after a short break with two big takeaways. So stick around for that.

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The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back. The rest of the episode is a mega combo of two takeaways. Two takeaways about ice cream in probably your life, because takeaways two and three. Because takeaways two and three.

In the 1900s, Herbert Hoover's United States and Fidel Castro's Cuba each used ice cream to prove the value and success of their way of life. Alex, Alex, Alex. Was it? Was it a Cold War? I love it. I love that. war. I love it. I love that. Like somehow we make ice cream political of like only here in capitalist America, could you get ice cream in Cuba? It's like only here in communist Cuba, could you get ice cream? Yes. Castro in particular, he was like, I'm going to prove the successfulness and greatness of the Cuban way of life.

And this was in a way that was distinct from the communist world. This was distinct from the rest of Latin America. He was like, we are going to do ice cream so good and in such a equitable and popular way that it will prove how great life is in Cuba. We're going to do it. Look, you know what? I feel again, I feel like if you're going to do nationalistic propaganda, if it's ice cream based, I'm more or less with you. Unless it, you know, comes with some kind of like ethnic cleansing, then I'm more or less with you. Yeah, and neither of these stories are that way. I think honestly, they're both good nation building. And there's a lot of ice cream paving the way. They're providing people

ice cream. It's fine. Only anarchy can actually give you the truest of ice cream, which is ice cream with all the toppings just slapped in there. Right. Anarchy is people just going behind that counter and opening the glass lids. Yeah, anarcho-geladism. Yeah. So these two countries, again, U.S. and Cuba, they both went through enormous change in the 1900s. The U.S. had always been imperialist in kind of a contiguous land way, but around the Spanish-American War in 1898, they began reaching for more global influence. And Cuba, it's the traditional land of the Taino people, the Guanahatepe people, and others. And then after Spanish colonization and a lot of U.S. economic intervention, some U.S. military intervention, after that, they became a communist country under Soviet

protection starting in 1959. But maybe the most amazing connection between them is they used especially the 1910s in the U.S. and then the 1960s in Cuba to massively ramp up their ice cream production and really go for it as like a political action, as a government project. Right, right. I mean, you can't be upset about the revolution when you got ice cream in your hand. 17. And when they joined, they formed a United States Food Administration, which was a government department led by private citizen Herbert Hoover. He's a future US president, but at the time he was a mining engineer, businessman, university lecturer, and a heroic European relief organizer. Earlier in the war, when the US was not involved, he got an organization going,

feeding over 9 million people per day in war-torn Belgium and northern France. Truly amazing humanitarian work. Feeding them ice cream? Not ice cream, no, just regular food. Well, then, okay. I mean, you're saying he's a hero, but he couldn't even feed all those people ice cream?

All right. Yeah, stupid bread and stuff. those people ice cream. All right. Yeah. Stupid bread and stuff. Get out of here. Stupid bread. Not interested. Protein. Don't need it.

Vegetables. Nah. Yeah. And so when the U.S. officially joins the war, they basically immediately make Herbert Hoover part of the government. They say now your food efforts are for America's food system and for the war, they basically immediately make Herbert Hoover part of the government. They say, now your food efforts are for America's food system and for the war. And most of Europe was rationing food one way or another at this time. Hoover did not believe in rationing. He called food rationing, quote, of the nature of dictatorship.

And so he believed Americans could be convinced to freely and democratically just make do and give up some things to help people and and hoover was generally successful at this campaign too they used the u.s mail to send postcards to families and got about 10 million households to sign off saying that they promised to use less wheat fat fat, and sugar. He got restaurants to save more than 300 million pounds of meat by adopting Meatless Monday programs. He broadly convinced people to make do and voluntarily give up stuff to help the war effort in the food system. Oh, that's pretty nice. That makes me feel slightly better about humanity. Yeah. And basically right up until he didn't do a good job in the depression,

Herbert Hoover was a major American hero. He was really beloved and considered great. I was thinking like Herbert Hoover. Why is that name familiar? Right. And so negatively. Yeah. He's not the FBI guy. So who is he? Oh, J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah. It's a tough last name. Yeah. The Hoovers had a bit of trouble vis-a-vis American policies.

And then you'll never guess the last name of my vacuum ex-wife. But boy, let me tell you, that's three strikes for me. Forget it. She was a real Hoover, if you know what I mean. Hoover? I barely know her. All right, I'm done. I promise.

And Hoover, in spite of all his Americans will just be heroic plan, he did need to implement controls on sugar because Americans also ate huge amounts of sugar compared to the rest of the world, even in 1917 and 18. We like it. That's how we do. It's tasty. And also, apparently, we were getting a lot of our processed sugar from facilities in Germany before the war, and now they were the enemy. So Hoover had to do a roundabout form of rationing by restricting industry's access to sugar. However, he prioritized the ice cream industry. He put a much smaller cut on that industry of about 25%, did cuts of 50% or more for the chocolate industry, soda industry, and chewing gum industries. Well, you got to keep people from turning communist and ice cream is the main way that we keep the red tide from flooding the U.S. Yeah. And he he even classified ice cream as a, quote, essential food stuff.

Agreed. Which was the top priority level for any food type. Hard agree. Yeah, me too. And that classification was because of its high calories in addition to its emotional comfort. The idea was it would improve people's morale and make calories go a long way for just preventing hunger. I mean, it is. I wonder if there's been any research on why ice cream,

because like there's always this sort of, I've had some anxiety sometimes and like one of the pieces of advice that i get is you can use something cold to help like when you're feeling anxious uh just kind of applying something cold and it kind of um hones your senses into your current situation brings you out of your uh sort of like your your mind labyrinth uh into reality and so i wonder if ice cream does the same thing. That would make sense. And yeah, especially in this 1910s when nobody understood mental health,

they were probably just accidentally enjoying that experience. You know, like it's just a lucky accident. It was good. Yeah. Accidentally doing something good for their mental health. Yeah. accidentally uh uh doing something good for their mental health yeah and and herbert hoover again this is like a u.s government department with wartime powers so he is personally manipulating the u.s dairy supply and food supply and sparks a little ice cream boom for the couple of years the u.s is in world war one it's it's much more readily available than other desserts. And that helps create a trend. Like more and more people are eating it now. And it was already

popular before that, too. Yeah. Yeah. And then Hoover's policies also had some knock-on effects that accidentally made us more of an ice cream country. In particular, just that his timeline lined up with the life of a guy named Howard Johnson. Howard Johnson is a huge brand to older people than us. But Howard Johnson was a real person. He was an American soldier in Europe in World War I. He also met a German street food vendor making amazing ice cream and bought the recipe off of him. The secret was double the butterfat. Great.

Really good. The secret is always either more fat or more sugar. That was his trick. And his other trick was entrepreneurship. Johnson returns home after the war, buys one run-down drugstore and soda fountain, turns it into the first of a massive chain of ice cream parlors. At their peak, they had more than 1,000 locations. chain of ice cream parlors. At their peak, they had more than 1000 locations, they opened a new one every nine days, and were the most popular food chain of any type in America. And their big selling point was 28 flavors of ice cream at a time when most people had only had vanilla before.

Wow, so they're like the early Baskin Robbins. Yeah, Baskin Robbins specifically tried to outdo them with 31 flavors. And the other part of Baskin Robbins' pitch in the 1950s was 31 flavors is enough for a new flavor every day of the month. I see. If you go in a long month. Yeah. I mean, 31 is more than 28. Math checks out. I'm not a medieval peasant. I can add that up. It's great. I know what Tauruses are, and I know 31 is bigger than 28. Yeah. So did the, like, what was it called? The Howard Johnson ice cream parlors? Yeah, it was just called Howard Johnson's.

And now that business exists today, but they pivoted completely out of ice cream. And they just did restaurants. They had, like, regular food. But they've pivoted out of ice cream and they just did restaurants. They had like regular food, but they've pivoted out of that into being a like medium size hotel chain. So there are Howard Johnson's hotels that are separate and different. They don't make ice cream anymore. What? They traded ice cream for hotelery?

That's. Yeah. That's psychotic behavior. Flurry? That's... Yeah. That's psychotic behavior. It's like if in the future McDonald's was like a medium-sized car company or something. Yeah. It's just...

Yeah. They flipped their capital into something else. Another boost to ice cream is that the U.S. government doubled down on this ice cream focus in World War II when another world war came along. And that was again, different from the rest of their allies. Like in the 1940s, the British government was trying to get their citizens to cut down on sugar and eat carrot based desserts. Carrot? Such as a carrot on a stick instead of an ice cream bar. This did not go well,

but that was their approach was ration stuff and less ice cream. No, Alex, back up. Carrot on a stick. Yeah, like the reward for a donkey or something. Well, it's supposed to. The carrot is already a stick. Why do you need to put the carrot on a stick? From Matt Siegel's book, it sounds like it was to simulate the physical experience of an ice cream bar where there's a handle. I know it didn't work. A carrot's a nice snack. I like carrots, but it's already a stick. You hold it like Bugs Bunny and you chew it. That's I'm so mad. Yeah. And like the British tried this silly idea because they were like, we have a limited amount of dairy and sugar, we have to use it for very important things. And the United States continued to do the opposite in a unique way. They just ramped up domestic production of ice cream.

In 1943, the US military shipped 143 million pounds of dehydrated base of ice cream to the front lines and to the troops. Cooks would like whip that up into of ice cream to the front lines and to the troops. Cooks would whip that up into full ice cream on the front lines. They had a whole ship in the Pacific Theater distributing ice cream. That was its whole job. There's a famous story about the U.S. aircraft carrier Lexington is torpedoed and sinking, and the sailors raid the ice cream before they abandon ship, like raid the freezers. There's also anecdotes about U.S. bomber crews figuring out that they could put buckets of ice cream mix on the outside of the bomber,

and then the cold temperature of the air and the shaking of the bomber would freeze and churn it into ice cream while they were flying their mission. churn it and ice cream while they were flying their mission. Man, you know what? I usually say nothing good can come of war, but it sounds like ice cream can come of war and that is good. So, God, I have to rethink my stance as a pacifist if it means more ice cream. Yeah, even the crews apparently felt like shaking from machine gun fire and midair explosions were like extra churning.

Great. Like, good. This is really going to turn up this ice cream. Well, the bad news is we lost a wing. But the good news is I think the rocky road is coming along nice. We lost a wing. Great. We'll get to the ground sooner to eat ice cream.

All right. Sounds good. That's how it works. Yeah, those were the main things like pushing US ice cream. There's also a minor boost from alcohol prohibition. You'll find stuff online that claims alcohol prohibition like caused ice cream culture. And that's not true. But there were beer breweries that switched to ice cream production during prohibition. And Anheuser-Busch sold ice cream under a slogan of eat a plate of ice cream every day. So there was like some boost from that.

But it's after these other factors. Sorry. Hang on. Their slogan was just eat a plate of ice cream every day. Yeah, it was just a bear command to eat like pounds of ice cream. How is that? That's not a slogan. That's just a sentence. I'd be like, I don't know, McDonald's slogan is buy our food. Buy our food all the time, please.

Consume burgers for sustenance. Yeah, I guess. Eat McDonald's. Eat a lot of fries. This is also really a time when a lot of just basic marketing is getting invented and basically selling a product to people. marketing is getting invented and basically selling a product to people. Like apparently vanilla ice cream was about 80% of the ice cream market in the U S in the 1940s that recently. And so a lot of the growth of ice cream is just various businesses saying, Hey, what if we actually tried to sell this stuff and come up with new ideas, like other flavors?

That's part of the growth of ice cream is just the growth of basic commercial ideas that we know now. Show me a communist country that could come up with the great slogan of eat a plate of ice cream a day. Cuba couldn't because they speak Spanish. Different language. That's true. Impossible. That's true. Check and mate.

Because, yeah, the other takeaway here is Cuba. I'm going to play the horns again. Because Cuba also uniquely, but sort of like the U.S., built the communist paradise of ice cream. And it was really personally driven by Fidel Castro as a person. He just really liked ice cream. Yeah. And my favorite evidence of it is that he takes power New Year's Day 1959. And there was a brief period where the U.S. hoped we would be friends with him.

And so in the spring of 1959, Fidel Castro goes on a whirlwind tour of New York City. And we're linking an amazing picture of him visiting the Bronx Zoo and going to town on an ice cream cone. Just really housing the thing. It's great. He loved ice cream a whole lot. Liked it before, and then on this 1959 trip, got to experience the latest in U.S. ice creams, which had really advanced. I'm looking at this photo, and you're not kidding. Yeah, like a kid. I'm wondering, though, the U.S. did mess up because I think if they had used an

actual waffle cone instead of a sugar cone, we may have we may have been great allies, but no. The next stage with Castro is this famous stage where diplomatic relations break down between Cuba and the U.S. And there's an embargo. You know, there are famous stories about people like John F. Kennedy in the U.S. stockpiling Cuban cigars because they know an embargo is coming. Castro did an ice cream version. He stockpiled U.S. ice cream. That's so wholesome. So charming.

Like, it's sort of like the picture at the Bronx Zoo. It's what a kid or me would do. Apparently, at one point, Castro exploited ties through a Canadian ambassador to smuggle in the 28 flavors of Howard Johnson's ice cream to Cuba. He wanted all 28 because like, yeah, a child or me would want that. And so did Fidel Castro. Yeah. I feel like this plays into the conspiracy theory that Fidel Castro is Trudeau's father, his real father. Have you heard this? Yes, I have. There's this conspiracy theory that Fidel Castro

is Trudeau's true father. There's no evidence of it, except I guess their eyes are kind of similar. And yeah, he had connections to Canada via the sort of ice cream trade. So, hmm. Interesting. Yeah, there's actually another Canadian deal coming, too. It keeps feeling more real. It keeps feeling more real. Because one other anecdote here is Castro was good friends in real life with novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was also a journalist and traveling around. And Garcia Marquez says one time he had a meal with Castro where Castro had a dessert of 18 scoops of ice cream. The guy is about that life. He loves ice cream in a big way.

Look, I mean, yes, he may have offed some political enemies, but the guy likes his ice cream, so... So, in the end, pretty cool. Balances out a little bit. You gotta admit. Yeah, and then the Canadian deal here is like Castro does not just personally seek out ice cream for himself. He says, I'm going to reshape the Cuban food system and infrastructure to make ice cream a thing all over the place here. And his main project was developing tropical dairy cows. Interesting. Holstein cattle in the northern U.S. don't really like a tropical climate.

No, they don't like the humidity. Makes them frizz up. I feel that. Oh, wilder spots. I'm imagining it. I'm liking it. And so Castro, through the Canadians, his government purchases thousands of Holsteins and then spends about a decade crossbreeding them with various other cows to try to generate a hot weather Holstein. And they succeeded. They called it the Tropical Holstein. They had much better dairy production in Cuba for the first time. And then in 1982, one Cuban cow named Ubre Blanca, which means white udder. Ubre Blanca sets a new Guinness World Record for individual dairy production, breaking the record of an American cow. I'm just imagining a tropical cow is like wearing sunglasses and Bermuda shorts.

No, that's very interesting. I mean, it is is like say what you will about Cuba, but I feel like making sure that everyone has ice cream is a little better than George Washington just being like, I need slaves to make me ice cream. Oh, it's melting. Right, because Castro really took on a Marxist approach to it. Like, not only did he get the cows going, he recruited a longtime supporter named Celia Sanchez to help him build the greatest ice cream parlor in the world. That was the goal. Like, we're going to build the single greatest ice cream parlor in the history of the earth in Havana. It's still going. You can visit and eat there today.

Wow. Okay. Describe this ice cream parlor. This ice cream parlor opened in 1966. They named it Coppelia, which is the same name as Celia Sanchez's favorite ballet. It's an entire city block in Havana, capacity for a thousand customers. At their peak in the early 1980s they served 50 flavors okay so 50 is more than 31 flavors so the math checks out better than baskin robbins yeah cuba wins uh sorry wrap it up yeah uh and they this building is also like surrounded by parks locals call it a catedral de El Lado, which is Cathedral of Ice Cream. And with my limited Italian, I could tell where that was going. Yeah. Yeah. Catedral is pretty even across the languages. And yeah. And yeah. And then Castro

then expanded to a bunch of other mini Coppelias, not that size, but like that name all across Cuba. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this causes an extreme recession in Cuba because Soviet funding was kind of propping up the economy. Even as Cuba kind of goes into the toilet economically, Castro used price controls to maintain a strict low price for ice cream. Wow. He said, like, this is one of the signs of Cuban society being a good place. We're going to keep this going. And you can go to Capella to this day. It's still the same thing. It's like the Hoover technique of like, we must prioritize ice cream above all. Yeah. Those two guys were like, this proves our way of life is the best.

Even though for like half the 1900s, they were bitter at a base who believed they were totally different societies. You know, I mean, we share so much in common. We've got a love for ice cream. I'm sure, you know, we've got this like little, oh, you know, we're ideological enemies, whatever. We both love ice cream. We should be friends yeah and i hope thanks thaw because yeah like fidel and then not the ice cream oh no why did i use thaw no with the cold war thaw and ice cream freeze right i want an ice cream tiny bit of softening if it's

really hard in the freezer there otherwise yeah yeah that's true yeah sometimes you do have to thaw the ice cream a little bit so it's scoopable such as our relations with other countries we should thaw them more so they're scoopable especially cuba the president i thought it was Kennedy, just some kind of speech like, We must thaw Cuba. Must make it scoopable. I will scoop Havana. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you,

such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a huge percentage of your ice cream is air, which is a total scam and totally necessary. cream is air, which is a total scam and totally necessary. Takeaways number two and number three, in the 1900s, Herbert Hoover's United States and Fidel Castro's Cuba each used ice cream to prove the value of their way of life. Plus tons more numbers about what qualifies as ice cream, what used to kind of sort of be ice cream, the origin of ice cream cones, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at

MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is celebrating an incredible Inuit food called Akatuk, and then there's a separate story of a U.S. dessert that used the wrong word for Inuit people. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 13 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It is special audio. It's just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun thing, check out our research sources. They're on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book The Secret History of Food by food writer

Matt Siegel, further work from food historian Sarah Lohman, and all kinds of digital resources from Gastro Obscura, Vice News, National Geographic, BBC Science Focus, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And hey, join the free SIF Discord. That's where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 44. That's about the topic of pigeons. Katie and I discover all sorts of stuff, such as the astounding pigeon secret of crop milk. So I recommend that episode and related thing. I recommend Katie's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

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