A bowl of ice cream and its long political history | Economic Times

Cold calculations and frozen franchises American ice-cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry was furiously attacked for politicising the pleasures of eating the frozen desserts, after it refused to sell ice-cream in Israel’s West Bank over the displacement of Palestinians. But this is misplaced, both for the brand, which was built on its progressive image, and for ice-cream itself, which has a long political history.Chilled desserts were once reserved for the rich, who could build houses to store ice. But in the 18th century, Americans pioneered the global sale of cheap ice, and mechanical cooling later made ice-cream even cheaper. But it was hard to do at home, and benefitted from scale, making it an ideal mass market product. 84939754American democracy delighted in ice-cream. George Washington brought ice-cream making equipment, but it was the third US president, Thomas Jefferson, who was the first American to record a recipe for it. Every president since has professed to love ice-cream, except Barack Obama, thanks to his first job at Baskin-Robbins in Hawaii: “Rows and rows of rockhard ice-cream can be brutal on the wrists.” Being able to eat it for free also quickly dispelled the pleasure. Donald Trump, on the other hand, insisted on being served two scoops, where others only got one.American ice-cream’s populist appeal, paradoxically, had its greatest impact with communists. To demonstrate the success of Cuba’s revolution, Fidel Castro wanted every Cuban to be able to enjoy ice-cream. He built a giant parlour named Coppelia, which served 1,000 at a time, and the ice-cream it still dishes out is one of the few pleasures left for Cubans. 84939742Soviet Russia was also known for high-quality ice-cream, which Russians enjoyed even in the winter. In Elizabeth David’s book Harvest of the Cold Months, she suggests this was because ice-cream making know-how was imported from the US in the ’20s, before the countries became implacable enemies. American ice-cream went mass-market in the ’50s, with a sharp decline in quality, but the Cold War protected Russian ice-cream from such “improvement”.One person who contributed to this was Margaret Thatcher who, before becoming a politician, worked on industrial icecream production. Her paper entitled ‘On the Elasticity of Ice Cream’ described how to incorporate more air, giving an illusion of creaminess at less cost.There is a photograph from the early 1970s, staged yet still poignant, showing Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi eating ice-cream near India Gate. In 1998, The Times of India reported that when George Fernandes visited Jayalalithaa to persuade her to join the NDA, she flattered him by serving Baskin-Robbins, despite her diabetes, and he flattered her back by saying, “I normally don’t have foreign icecream, but today in your honour, I shall have some.”And when our austere prime minister promised to eat icecream with PV Sindhu after the Olympics, was it a hint of the famous Gujarati love of ice-cream?