
The History of Ice Cream - evilsimon
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/06/30/how-ice-cream-made-america/leqtRFPQZxn8IrCXww1W2O/story.html
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crazygringo
> _Americans are no longer the world’s top consumers of ice cream — that crown
> goes to China_

That is insane to me. I lived in Beijing 20 years ago, and Chinese food had
shockingly few sweet things ("dessert" was not a concept at all) and no dairy
whatsoever. A few stores had Snickers bars by the counters next to sweetened
bean paste, that was pretty much it.

The fact that the country now consumes more sweetened dairy than the US is...
completely unimaginable to me.

Anyone from China here who can describe what happened and how it was adopted?

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cbhl
I'm in the middle of reading _Factfulness: Ten Reasons We 're Wrong About the
World_ by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

I think it provides a great model of what is happening in the world,
especially in this case. Chinese people have more money per capita, and so now
they can spend it on sweets and meat.

McDonald's being seen as an upscale brand probably also helps -- even cartoons
(like Quanzhi Gaoshou, which is about eSports) have blatant product placement
for McDonald's ice cream.

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singularity2001
… more money per capita, and so now they can spend it on sweets

I thought sugar is a poor-man's food.

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cbhl
Read the book! It talks about how sugar is a sign of wealth in developing
countries, and a sign of poverty in developed ones.

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cozzyd
Some of you may have made liquid nitrogen ice cream... which is delicious.
Even better is liquid argon ice cream, as the argon is heavier than air and
gives the ice cream a frothy texture.

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lighttower
That's got to be some very expensive ice cream! Argon is not cheap

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cozzyd
Yeah we ordinarily would have used nitrogen but we had access to some leftover
argon that would have boiled away over the weekend anyways

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croisillon
if you happen to be in vienna, austria, the ice cream festival is this week-
end at the augarten

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cyknus
I feel i'm on Greendale

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jorbs
Do I have to Facebook read this? Oh boy

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briandear
It’s hard to have any sympathy for news organizations when they insist on this
nonsense. How can any of these orgs report objectively about Facebook or
privacy issues when they themselves are the biggest offenders by forcing this
crap on people?

I am a paid subscriber to a select few news orgs, but even those try my
patience. Very hard to care about the news business when they engage in this.

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puranjay
I finally paid for a subscription to New Yorker. Man, the entire experience
was frustrating as hell.

Old school media outlets are just so clueless about digital models

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Theodores
Some myths are best perpetuated, e.g. 'nobody will ever need any more than
640K' (paraphrased) and in the UK there is a pretty good myth about Margaret
Thatcher 'inventing' soft scoop ice cream. In some circles it has been
repeated often enough to be as good as true.

One story that I wish was a myth is how ice cream used to be made from pig fat
in the UK. Yes, pig fat, not dairy fat.

If you lived in Gloucester then you could see how this worked. The Walls Ice
Cream factory was next to the Walls bacon factory. And they didn't have many
deliveries from distinctive Milk Marketing Board lorries entering the factory
gates. For vegetarians this 'secret' was not obvious, food labelling wasn't
entirely required during the 1970's so one was assuming rather than knowing
that the product was dairy based.

This did change and Wall's Ice Cream moved on from pig fat to palm oil. This
was not to end the 'Aushwitz for pigs' aspect of the Gloucester factory, it
was just economic realities. The pig fat could be sold at a premium on the
global marketplace for such things and substituted with the cheaper,
rainforest-destroying palm oil shipped in from the other side of the world.

Put together, I do wonder if any Wall's employees ever thought about the
realities of what they were doing sending their vans around housing estates.

So first of all the product - cheapest sugar mixed with pig fat and padded out
with air. Not exactly the ice cream product that people imagine it to be, not
exactly great for diabetes and clogging arteries, not that it matters with
kids to get them forming such life habits. They don't need vitamins when there
are perfectly good preservatives to give them ADHD.

Then the ice cream vans themselves. Belching out fumes of lead at child
height. Plus the noise pollution, spoiling the tranquillity of a children's
play area with the throb of some poxy four cylinder engine not to mention the
'music' played over the PA system. Not all the drivers had a healthy interest
in young children, but in those days we didn't have the words we have today
for describing or reporting such characters. The mobile chicane created by the
ice cream van could also bring death to the roads in the pre-speed bump era
when housing estate speed limits were 60 mph and nobody had seat belts.

There is also the pester-power and FOMO aspects. What a heartless killjoy a
parent would be if they didn't give their hard earned money over to their kids
to fritter away on some pig fat whilst getting gassed with neuro-toxins at the
ice cream van, to spoil their appetite for dinner?

At the time Walls had an advertising slogan that was a variation on the slogan
the condom manufacturer's used. So, for ice cream you had 'Stop Me and Buy
One!' and for condoms you had 'Buy Me and Stop One!'.

Despite all of the above people have extremely fond memories of ice cream
vans.

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tomerv
I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're saying, because it seems like
a rant bordering on conspiracy theory (e.g. preservatives causing ADHD, which
I'm sure isn't based on any real science; or insinuating that ice cream van
drivers are pedophiles). My take is that you simply don't like ice cream, and
don't like other people enjoying it.

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pbhjpbhj
Not OP. Couple of supporting points.

The "E numbers" that supposedly caused hyperactivity, mainly orange colour
IIRC, were banned in the EU I think.

Ice-cream vans were always badly maintained (repurposed older vans I think),
and in the 80s used leaded fuel.

Ice-cream got worse in the last decade or so as now stabilising gums and foams
have been perfected somewhat and so ice-cream is mainly air (you can scoop it
from the freezer). Lollies too have gums in them that I'm sure they didn't
used to.

