Fake ice cream is not delicious.
I was at the grocery store earlier this afternoon. I went to buy some parchment paper, because I’ve decided to follow Michael Pollan’s decree
I took my parchment paper, and pecans, and two boxes of free-after-coupon cereal, and went to the cashier. And ahead of me, there was a guy with four tubs of Breyers. He was really excited about the deal he was getting.
“Two litres of ice cream for only two dollars!” he said to the cashier. “I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
Indeed, he shouldn’t have believed his eyes. What he was buying wasn’t ice cream – it was frozen dessert.
This may not mean anything to you. It didn’t mean anything to me, either, until a survey company called me a couple of weeks ago to ask my opinion on supermarkets putting frozen dessert next to ice cream.
“Would it surprise you,” they asked, “to find out that frozen dessert was actually an edible oil product?”
Yes, it did. Also, it grossed me out.
(This isn’t true in other countries. “Frozen dessert” can be a catchphrase for ice cream, gelato, sorbet, etc. But in Canada, it means that the thing doesn’t meet the legal requirements for ice cream. Which, ew.)
I didn’t tell the guy in front of me what he was buying. I decided that it wasn’t my responsibility to make other people read the ingredients.
This is a pretty good illustration of the problem of cheap, come to think of it. Cheap doesn’t care about value, just about price. Cheap doesn’t check to see what they’re consuming – whether it’s made from oil, or sewn in a sweatshop in Thailand, or grown on a factory farm. Cheap just wants to spend as little money as possible.
And Cheap gets what they pay for. In this case, a carton of emulsified, frozen corn oil. Strawberry-flavoured.