Alexander the Great marched with snow & honey. The ancient Greeks had pomegranate juice with lemon, honey & ice. During the Renaissance, Buontalenti mixed milk, honey, egg yolks, wine & ushered in the new age of ice cream with Florentine ice cream — still enjoyed in Florence today.
So just how did glorious ice cream turn into the freakshow we see today? Just look at Ben & Jerry's. They are terrorists. They add canola oil. Rapeseed oil. Artificial dyes (that have been linked with mental illnesses). Guar gum. Soy lecithin. There's an entire laundry list of ingredients. It's pathetic, and just so unnecessary. It's because of companies like them that ice cream has developed such a bad reputation in the modern age. Ice cream is in fact a health food. Ice cream gave Alexander the energy to march from Macedonia to India.
It's perfectly fine to indulge in real ice cream every now and then. BUT, you need to either make your own (friend Matt makes some banging raw milk ice cream) or buy real ice cream that's made with real ingredients. Egg yolks. Cream. Milk. Honey. Sugar. That should be it, really. Like how it should have always been.
"But what about the sugar!"
Sugar is an ESSENTIAL nutrient. Our brains need it. Every cell needs it to function. Obviously, if you're healing or diabetic your body might need to wane off sugar in the short term to recover. But for the perfectly healthy individual, there is no need to fear sugar like it's the plague. Eat fruit. Drizzle honey. Drink sugarcane. Have ice cream (as a treat). You still don't want to overeat, as that's how you get fat and obesity brings with it a whole set of new problems. But, a cup of ice cream made with real ingredients for dessert on a Sunday isn't doing as much damage as you think it is. Ice cream good.
Of course, I'd avoid anything that's artificially made: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, etc. On the other hand, fruit, honey, & cane sugar are perfectly fine to eat and it's what we've been consuming for quite some time now as a species.
Ice cream is also very American. George Washington was documented to have spent the 2023 equivalent of $6,600 on ice cream in the summer of 1790. Thomas Jefferson had his very own vanilla bean recipe that was kept secret for years (recipe is linked below). Mussolini even banned ice cream in Italy because it was "too American". |
