Consumer Report
Things To Consider Before Purchasing Vanilla Ice Cream.
I was at the store the other day and I stumbled into a bargain for ice cream. Ice cream at the bargain price of 1.99 per gallon, and it was my favorite brand and not just my favorite brand but also my favorite flavor which, if you happen to care, is creamy vanilla. That is right, vanilla, I know what you are thinking of all of the flavors out there, vanilla is considered the most mundane. It is overused in banana splits, milkshakes and hardly as mesmerizing as chocolate praline, but nevertheless it is my favorite flavor. And it is so because of its simplicity, because it is excellent at being the average flavor of ice cream. Not only does it excel in averageness but it also makes itself the default flavor for all ice cream companies. Regardless of what any one tells you no ice cream company would ever dare to call itself an ice cream company without having vanilla as a flavor. Some companies might not produce chocolate praline, caramel chocolate almond or even more exotic flavors but they will all produce vanilla.
So hate it, think it too average but you’ve got to admit it, Vanilla is central to the very existence of ice cream. If you wanted to examine the reason for the popularity of something so average as vanilla and not just accept it as a neutral ice cream flavor, neutral meaning not an overly powerful ice cream, in a sense not overly ice-cream-like, vanilla is as close to being another food as ice cream can get, so it quenches many hungers. It is a fair compromise; you don’t have to want ice cream to eat vanilla ice cream, but you certainly have to want ice cream to eat rocky road.
It is this supreme mentality of self indifference that vanilla ice cream suffers that allows it to be so successful. Vanilla ice cream does not care if you really like it, it is not out to impress you, it will not wear Oreo cookies to get you exited about licking it. Go ahead, treat it badly, throw it on cake, churn it in the blender; in the end vanilla will accept such indecencies and quietly melt into your mouth without calling on more than the standard number of taste buds. Some ice creams are really trying to make every taste bud wake up but definitely not vanilla.
Vanilla, then, is the perfect ice cream for a democracy. It may be the heart of the republic. We may even find, though no substantial research has been done, yes we may certainly find that the closer a country is to dictatorship the lower the vanilla ice cream consumption rate will be. And this is so obvious that a fair index could easily be created wherein Most Favored Nation status could be granted based on the volume per capita consumption of vanilla ice cream. It would be impossible for a country to lick the greatest quantity of vanilla ice cream and not be average, I mean democratic, I mean a Friend of the United States. The real nice thing about tying Most Favored Nation status to vanilla ice cream consumption is that it would make the certification process fair, and if America really wanted to be hard-ass about it we could make it so that the ice cream would have to be purchased from the United States. Of course NAFTA partners would be certified to produce their own vanilla, but it would be heavily monitored by Congress and enforcement could be handled by the, ever searching for a success story, ATF.
Even at a philosophical, artistic and religious level vanilla is sort of the minimalist’s ice cream, a dadaist ice cream, and perfectly puritanical. I don’t know what the archeological record shows but I think it fair to assume that the stoics were cone fed vanilla ice cream. It is easy to be a stoic when you eat vanilla ice cream, it is perfectly satisfying but not overbearing, as much as you need but not too much, you can imagine eating vanilla ice cream and eating something else afterwards, in other words, vanilla ice cream does not claim to be the end all, the complete meal, it is just something else that you have on your plate. That kind of humble attitude is so amazing that one cannot even overdose on the stuff.
Which leads me back to what I really wanted to say about this amazing thing that I found my favorite vanilla ice cream at a great price, a price that was so good I could not even use any other coupons with it, it was so good that it had an expiration date as all good things must expire, a price of such dismal proportions that I was sure that if I bought more than a dozen the manufacturer of this ice cream would go under. But they had foreseen this economic fatality, this incredible price leader was being sold under actual production cost, so there was a limit to three gallons at that price, if I wanted more at that cheap price, stealing it would cost more, I would have to cheat the system, I would have to dash to another store like this one, with the same sale price, and pray to god that my picture was not being scanned and propagated throughout every major supermarket as having already purchased my allotted amount. I suppose if I was an idealist of sorts I could have demanded that I be permitted to buy as much as I wanted, I mean this is a capitalist country, I should be able to buy as many gallons of vanilla ice cream as I can consume and more, but in the end the supermarkets could get revenge by removing my special discount card causing me to lose the gross monetary equal of a senior discount. I mean some supermarkets have already eliminated coupons because people were using them to save more and more money by buying more and more of the coupon discounted product; and so all those savings were piling up, it’s a dizzying formula buy more save more. So if they can take coupons away as far as I am concerned they are unstoppable.
But as so often happens in my life, whenever I finds something completely irresistible something makes it resistible and so it was the case here. Right before the Oracle of vanilla I found myself anticipating the increased girth that would be the product of my consuming all the gallons of vanilla ice cream that were theoretically now affordable and thus available to me. Is it possible that capitalism is so self-destructive that it would allow for me to find loop holes in purchasing quotas so that I could over eat myself to death. And, I being profoundly productive labor would be subtracted from production capacity while increasing my chances for coronary bypass surgery. Was Malthus right, in a way, except that it would not be the number of people that would increase exponentially and disproportionately against production capacity, but that the populace would increase in size. So, because of foods like vanilla and bacon, made affordable by capitalism, we would each become the equivalent of one and a half people or in some cases two people. And if the average mass of a Human Being is being doubled, is that not the same as doubling the population of an entire country without doubling its tax revenue? And, if so, why would any decent government not take actions to correct such deviant behavior or to tax it appropriately? And all that can also lead one to conclude that the zero population growth figures cited by certain first-world countries need to be revised to reflect the gross girth of their people.
And the thoughts of this disproportionate self kept on eating at me and kissing me and licking me, and I found myself dreading the thought of eating vanilla ice cream. I thought, “how can this ice cream company ever compensate society for all of those pounds that it was selling to its customers?” Imagine how many people have been unknowingly sent to their grave by something so presumably innocent as vanilla ice cream? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How could anyone measure the cost to a nation? Impossible! It struck me, I don’t mean a brain stroke, but it struck me mathematically (and trust me, for me mathematics is a mental stroke) that from the weight I would gain, the less productive that I would be, and this being an unsustainable proposition, I would need to consume ever more ice cream in order to maintain my newfound mass. And you know love of the self being what it is, the more of you there is the harder it is to become less of yourself; losing weight is difficult because you lose a part of yourself, losing weight is grotesquely partial suicide, and that is why it is so difficult to stomach it.
So I looked at that bargain price and thought to myself, “Is that company willing to compensate me for all of the futile weight loss courses that I am going to have to take? Are they going to increase my salary and reduce my work week so as to compensate for my new found laziness?” In other words, who would pay for all the added health risk? Who would cover the cost of psychoanalyzing a depression from my not being content with the over abundance of flesh? And it was during this incredibly lucid moment that I made the decision not to buy because I had considered all of the cost and it was definitely not a bargain! Damn it, price those gallons of vanilla ice cream higher than the queens head, price them so that they cover all of the hidden costs of eating them, and then I will buy it at the right price, but never before then!!!
RC
I was at the store the other day and I stumbled into a bargain for ice cream. Ice cream at the bargain price of 1.99 per gallon, and it was my favorite brand and not just my favorite brand but also my favorite flavor which, if you happen to care, is creamy vanilla. That is right, vanilla, I know what you are thinking of all of the flavors out there, vanilla is considered the most mundane. It is overused in banana splits, milkshakes and hardly as mesmerizing as chocolate praline, but nevertheless it is my favorite flavor. And it is so because of its simplicity, because it is excellent at being the average flavor of ice cream. Not only does it excel in averageness but it also makes itself the default flavor for all ice cream companies. Regardless of what any one tells you no ice cream company would ever dare to call itself an ice cream company without having vanilla as a flavor. Some companies might not produce chocolate praline, caramel chocolate almond or even more exotic flavors but they will all produce vanilla.
So hate it, think it too average but you’ve got to admit it, Vanilla is central to the very existence of ice cream. If you wanted to examine the reason for the popularity of something so average as vanilla and not just accept it as a neutral ice cream flavor, neutral meaning not an overly powerful ice cream, in a sense not overly ice-cream-like, vanilla is as close to being another food as ice cream can get, so it quenches many hungers. It is a fair compromise; you don’t have to want ice cream to eat vanilla ice cream, but you certainly have to want ice cream to eat rocky road.
It is this supreme mentality of self indifference that vanilla ice cream suffers that allows it to be so successful. Vanilla ice cream does not care if you really like it, it is not out to impress you, it will not wear Oreo cookies to get you exited about licking it. Go ahead, treat it badly, throw it on cake, churn it in the blender; in the end vanilla will accept such indecencies and quietly melt into your mouth without calling on more than the standard number of taste buds. Some ice creams are really trying to make every taste bud wake up but definitely not vanilla.
Vanilla, then, is the perfect ice cream for a democracy. It may be the heart of the republic. We may even find, though no substantial research has been done, yes we may certainly find that the closer a country is to dictatorship the lower the vanilla ice cream consumption rate will be. And this is so obvious that a fair index could easily be created wherein Most Favored Nation status could be granted based on the volume per capita consumption of vanilla ice cream. It would be impossible for a country to lick the greatest quantity of vanilla ice cream and not be average, I mean democratic, I mean a Friend of the United States. The real nice thing about tying Most Favored Nation status to vanilla ice cream consumption is that it would make the certification process fair, and if America really wanted to be hard-ass about it we could make it so that the ice cream would have to be purchased from the United States. Of course NAFTA partners would be certified to produce their own vanilla, but it would be heavily monitored by Congress and enforcement could be handled by the, ever searching for a success story, ATF.
Even at a philosophical, artistic and religious level vanilla is sort of the minimalist’s ice cream, a dadaist ice cream, and perfectly puritanical. I don’t know what the archeological record shows but I think it fair to assume that the stoics were cone fed vanilla ice cream. It is easy to be a stoic when you eat vanilla ice cream, it is perfectly satisfying but not overbearing, as much as you need but not too much, you can imagine eating vanilla ice cream and eating something else afterwards, in other words, vanilla ice cream does not claim to be the end all, the complete meal, it is just something else that you have on your plate. That kind of humble attitude is so amazing that one cannot even overdose on the stuff.
Which leads me back to what I really wanted to say about this amazing thing that I found my favorite vanilla ice cream at a great price, a price that was so good I could not even use any other coupons with it, it was so good that it had an expiration date as all good things must expire, a price of such dismal proportions that I was sure that if I bought more than a dozen the manufacturer of this ice cream would go under. But they had foreseen this economic fatality, this incredible price leader was being sold under actual production cost, so there was a limit to three gallons at that price, if I wanted more at that cheap price, stealing it would cost more, I would have to cheat the system, I would have to dash to another store like this one, with the same sale price, and pray to god that my picture was not being scanned and propagated throughout every major supermarket as having already purchased my allotted amount. I suppose if I was an idealist of sorts I could have demanded that I be permitted to buy as much as I wanted, I mean this is a capitalist country, I should be able to buy as many gallons of vanilla ice cream as I can consume and more, but in the end the supermarkets could get revenge by removing my special discount card causing me to lose the gross monetary equal of a senior discount. I mean some supermarkets have already eliminated coupons because people were using them to save more and more money by buying more and more of the coupon discounted product; and so all those savings were piling up, it’s a dizzying formula buy more save more. So if they can take coupons away as far as I am concerned they are unstoppable.
But as so often happens in my life, whenever I finds something completely irresistible something makes it resistible and so it was the case here. Right before the Oracle of vanilla I found myself anticipating the increased girth that would be the product of my consuming all the gallons of vanilla ice cream that were theoretically now affordable and thus available to me. Is it possible that capitalism is so self-destructive that it would allow for me to find loop holes in purchasing quotas so that I could over eat myself to death. And, I being profoundly productive labor would be subtracted from production capacity while increasing my chances for coronary bypass surgery. Was Malthus right, in a way, except that it would not be the number of people that would increase exponentially and disproportionately against production capacity, but that the populace would increase in size. So, because of foods like vanilla and bacon, made affordable by capitalism, we would each become the equivalent of one and a half people or in some cases two people. And if the average mass of a Human Being is being doubled, is that not the same as doubling the population of an entire country without doubling its tax revenue? And, if so, why would any decent government not take actions to correct such deviant behavior or to tax it appropriately? And all that can also lead one to conclude that the zero population growth figures cited by certain first-world countries need to be revised to reflect the gross girth of their people.
And the thoughts of this disproportionate self kept on eating at me and kissing me and licking me, and I found myself dreading the thought of eating vanilla ice cream. I thought, “how can this ice cream company ever compensate society for all of those pounds that it was selling to its customers?” Imagine how many people have been unknowingly sent to their grave by something so presumably innocent as vanilla ice cream? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How could anyone measure the cost to a nation? Impossible! It struck me, I don’t mean a brain stroke, but it struck me mathematically (and trust me, for me mathematics is a mental stroke) that from the weight I would gain, the less productive that I would be, and this being an unsustainable proposition, I would need to consume ever more ice cream in order to maintain my newfound mass. And you know love of the self being what it is, the more of you there is the harder it is to become less of yourself; losing weight is difficult because you lose a part of yourself, losing weight is grotesquely partial suicide, and that is why it is so difficult to stomach it.
So I looked at that bargain price and thought to myself, “Is that company willing to compensate me for all of the futile weight loss courses that I am going to have to take? Are they going to increase my salary and reduce my work week so as to compensate for my new found laziness?” In other words, who would pay for all the added health risk? Who would cover the cost of psychoanalyzing a depression from my not being content with the over abundance of flesh? And it was during this incredibly lucid moment that I made the decision not to buy because I had considered all of the cost and it was definitely not a bargain! Damn it, price those gallons of vanilla ice cream higher than the queens head, price them so that they cover all of the hidden costs of eating them, and then I will buy it at the right price, but never before then!!!
RC
posted by Ricardo Correa at 10:34 PM
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