THE VANILLA OF SOCIETY

 

I’ve spent my life developing scores of flavors,1 and yet most people still say, “I’ll take vanilla.”

(—Howard Johnson)

If we really need a culinary term of endearment for our loved ones, in lieu of honey, we could always borrow from the French, who call their lovers mon chou2 (“my cabbage”), which is kind of cute but also confusing, especially if you’re a Dutch cheesemonger, in which case mon chou refers to a soft cream cheese3 containing 73 percent fat and made from cow’s milk.*4

Or ma fraise (“my strawberry”), though strawberries are also a French euphemism for menstruation—e.g., la femme fraise des bois5 (“the strawberry woman”) and c’est la saison des fraises6 (“it’s strawberry season”)—so calling a woman “strawberry” could also get confusing. Or we could just go back to calling our loved ones “vanilla,” which would make the most sense, as this was taken as a compliment up until at least the 1800s,7 meaning the recipient was rare and coveted, a flavor everyone loves: “Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanille of society.”8

(—Reverend Sydney Smith, London, c. 1837)

Salt had a similar connotation back when it was a precious trading commodity and a necessity for food preservation prior to refrigeration; in fact, there’s an old English fairy tale about a father who asks his daughter how much she loves him, to which she replies, “I love you as fresh meat loves salt.”9 The father then gets angry and banishes her for comparing him to something so coarse and superfluous, until she arranges for a feast to be secretly prepared without any salt—wherein he realizes how bland life is without it and promptly forgives her. Nowadays, of course, salt is cheap and easy, and is also used as an adjective—“salty”—to describe crabby people, likely dating back to the stereotype of sailors being tough,10 foul-mouthed, and aggressive.

Whereas the semantics of vanilla shifted not because of any change in popularity, cost, or demand but, at least in part, because LGBTQ populations in the United States started using it11 as a metaphor to distinguish between conventional (straight) and gay or fetish clubs in the 1970s—as heterosexuality, much like vanilla ice cream, was ubiquitous and conventional, part of the fabric of so-called normality. Then the straight population appropriated the term to more generally mean plain or boring—though still largely in the context of sex and relationships—and “vanilla” became a synonym for “ordinary.”

But you don’t become the world’s most popular ice cream flavor12 and second most expensive13 spice*14 by being ordinary—and actual vanilla is anything but.

For starters, vanilla is the only edible fruit15 (though we colloquially call it a bean or a pod) to grow on freaking orchids, despite their being the largest family of flowers, with more than 25,000 species.16 It can take years for one of these orchids,17 which grow only in select areas twenty-five degrees north or south of the equator,18 like Mexico and Madagascar, to bear flowers—and any flowers they do yield will bloom only for a few hours19 before they shrivel up and die, unless they’re pollinated. To add to this inordinately tight window for pollination, their hermaphroditic sex parts are separated by a little flap called the rostellum20 that needs to be pushed aside for pollination and there’s only one or two species that know how to pollinate them,21 at least so we think. Both of these species, the melipona and euglossine bees, are nearly extinct,22 which means that vanilla orchids in the wild have only around a 1 percent chance of producing fruit without intervention23.

And speaking of sex parts, vanilla is one of the few ice cream flavors to be named after genitalia,*24 thanks to Spanish conquistadors who “discovered” it in the sixteenth century and called it vainilla, a Spanish diminutive of the Latin vagina,25 because of its resemblance when spread open to harvest its seeds (and probably because they hadn’t seen their wives in a long time).*26 They then brought the plants back home to Europe and spent three hundred years trying in vain to pollinate them because they couldn’t find the rostellum. (Insert clitoris joke here.)

It wasn’t until 1841 that a twelve-year-old slave named Edmond Albius27 figured out you could pollinate the flowers by hand using a stick or blade of grass to move the flap aside, which is how it’s still done today. (Albius was freed seven years later when France outlawed slavery, then imprisoned for allegedly stealing jewelry, then freed again five years after that, after his former owner petitioned the French government to grant him clemency in honor of his contribution to the vanilla industry and for helping to position France as its largest producer, a title now held by Madagascar28.)

Because its flowers tend to bloom only one at a time,29 it can take months to pollinate a single plant. Then, after pollination, it takes another six to nine months30 before the fruits are ready to harvest, also by hand. But at that point they don’t have any flavor, so they need to be cured and conditioned31 through a process that involves hand massaging them, laying them in the sun to dry each morning, and wrapping them in blankets and tucking them in at night to sweat, which can take another nine months. So you could probably have a kid and put them through kindergarten in the same time, and for less aggravation, than it would take to seed and harvest your own vanilla crop.

Of course, if you did it right, your vanilla could be worth as much as six hundred dollars per kilo,32 more than the price of silver. But it’d also take around six hundred blossoms to produce said kilo,33 as there’s a lot of shrinkage involved and the final cured beans contain only about 2 percent extractable flavor,34 so you’re looking at about a dollar per blossom to plant, pollinate, harvest, massage, cure, and sell your own vanilla beans—if you’re lucky.

And that’s assuming you don’t have any losses from fungus, pests, disease, or theft.

In Madagascar, a few kilos of vanilla beans can be worth more than the average per capita annual income,35 so theft can be a life-or-death problem. Some farmers harvest their beans months early36 to deter thieves, resulting in a lower-quality and less valuable fruit that’s more prone to disease,37 while others seek vigilante justice with machetes38 or use pins or stamps to “tattoo” their beans with their names or identifying marks.39

In fact, a lot of people who call vanilla ordinary have probably never tasted it, as up to 99 percent of the vanilla flavoring in foods is artificial,40 derived from things such as wood pulp, tree bark, rice bran,41 chloroform,42 or castoreum, a natural excretion43 extracted from the asses of North American beavers. In 2006, a Japanese scientist even proved that vanilla flavoring can be extracted from cow dung.44 In full transparency, it’s not too likely that you’ll ever consume anything flavored with castoreum or cow dung—but if you did, manufacturers wouldn’t have to tell you about it, as the FDA’s definition of “natural flavors”45 includes flavors isolated from natural plant and animal products such as fruit, bark, and beaver glands.

(Note that this caveat only applies to foods intentionally flavored with cow dung; the US Department of Agriculture has a “zero-tolerance” policy when it comes to fecal contamination of meat, but it applies only to visible contamination46 detectible with the naked eye. Accordingly, a 2015 study of 458 pounds of beef47 purchased from grocery stores in twenty-six US cities—using actual scientific equipment—found that all of it was contaminated with fecal bacteria. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has acceptable limits for mammalian excreta,48 rot, mold, insect fragments, rodent hairs, and maggots in food. These limits don’t apply to meat, but it’s worth knowing that you might be eating a gram of insect fragments per every gram of pasta—and one rodent hair, on average, in every 50 grams.)

As for the 1 percent of foods that do contain actual vanilla, odds are it’s in the form of an extract diluted with alcohol, water, dextrose, stabilizers,49 and, you guessed it, corn syrup.

So vanilla isn’t very vanilla. It was slandered as ordinary not because it was boring but because it was so well liked and ubiquitous (and probably because of its perceived whiteness, even though vanilla beans are black and vanilla ice cream, often yellowish with prominent black specks*—not as diverse, maybe, as rainbow sherbet, but not exactly sterile, either).

Yet what really makes vanilla an endearing name for loved ones is that, above all, it’s comforting: churn it with a little cream and sugar at a temperature cold enough to create ice crystals (typically about 27°F), and it provides a pharmaceutical-grade level of comfort that’s helped us cope with everything from bad breakups and oral surgery to Nazi fascism, as we’ll see later.

That’s not to say that vanilla is the only flavor of ice cream that’s comforting. Flavored ices and frozen desserts have been coveted for thousands of years, across many cultures, by people who have gone to great lengths to procure them. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to climb mountains to harvest ice they’d mix with wine50 or honey to make sorbet, a word that comes from the Arabic sharba51 (“drink”) and sharbat, a drink made by mixing snow52 with various spices and flower blossoms. The Chinese made sherbet by covering containers with snow53 and saltpeter (also used in making gunpowder) to lower the freezing point of milk mixed with rice, and the Mongols made ice cream by riding horses in subfreezing temperatures54 while carrying cream stored in animal intestines, which would then freeze and be churned smooth by the galloping of their horses.

Even as late as the eighteenth century, ice cream was often reserved for those patient enough to wait for snowstorms or wealthy and patient enough to harvest ice from mountains or frozen rivers and keep it from melting in underground pits insulated with layers of sawdust, straw, or animal fur.55

Beethoven, for example, writes from Vienna in 1794, “the Viennese are afraid that it will soon be impossible56 for them to have any ice-creams; for as the winter was mild, ice is rare,” while George Washington tried to avoid such a fate by harvesting snow and ice from the rivers surrounding Mount Vernon but was, he writes in a 1784 letter to colleague Robert Morris, “lurched”* when it melted prematurely:

P.S. The house I filled with ice does not answer57—it is gone already—if you will do me the favor to cause a description of yours to be taken—the size—manner of building, & mode of management, & forwarded to me—I shall be much obliged—My house was filled chiefly with Snow. have you ever tried Snow? do you think it is owing to this that I am lurched.

Despite Morris’s instructions, Washington was lurched again a year later, writing in his diary on June 5, 1785, that “there was not the smallest particle remaining”58 when he checked on the ice he’d packed in his cellar months earlier. Fortunately, he was wealthy enough to throw money at the problem, later spending 51 pounds, 6 shillings, and 2 pence59 (equal to about two hundred dollars today) on ice cream during the summer of 1790 alone. And he still fared better in his experiments with freezing than Francis Bacon, who tragically lost his life in 1626 after catching a cold while attempting to freeze a chicken by stuffing it with snow.60

And it wasn’t just ice that was difficult to procure. Martha Washington once served guests a “stale and rancid”61 trifle in 1789 because she couldn’t find fresh cream; this happened in New York City—to the first First Lady of the United States—so just imagine what things were like for the other 99 percent.

Even getting sugar was a pain in the ass. Explains Anne Cooper Funderburg (more politely) in Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, “Refined sugar was sold in cones or loaves,62 which varied greatly in size but were always formidably hard.” Cooks literally needed hatchets or mallets to break pieces off.

And even if you had all the ingredients, turning them into ice cream wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for vanilla ice cream,63 acquired during his time in France, required specialty equipment and more than a dozen steps:

Ice Cream.

2 bottles of good cream.

6 yolks of eggs.

1/2 lb. sugar

 How to prepare:

1. mix the yolks & sugar

2. put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla.

3. when near boiling take it off & pour it gently into the mixture of eggs & sugar.

4. stir it well.

5. put it on the fire again stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent it’s sticking to the casserole.

6. when near boiling take it off and strain it thro’ a towel.

7. put it in the Sabottiere*

8. then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served. put into the ice a handful of salt.

9. put salt on the coverlid of the Sabotiere & cover the whole with ice.

10. leave it still half a quarter of an hour.

11. hen turn the Sabottiere in the ice 10 minutes

12. open it to loosen with a spatula the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere.

13. shut it & replace it in the ice

14.open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides

15.when well taken (prise) stir it well with the Spatula.

16.put it in moulds, justling it well down on the knee.

17. then put the mould into the same bucket of ice.

18. leave it there to the moment of serving it.

19. to withdraw it, immerse the mould in warm water, turning it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate.

20. So part of the reason ice cream was so coveted is that, like vanilla, it was scarce and impractical. Writes Funderburg, “the average family was too busy surviving64 to indulge in a luxury that melted, consumed scarce ingredients, and required substantial preparation time.”

And yet, even as its availability and practicality increased, so, too, did its associations with comfort.

When the Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol in the 1920s, many early American breweries such as Anheuser-Busch65 and Yuengling*66 turned to making ice cream and soda to stay afloat, capitalizing both on shared manufacturing processes, like bottling and refrigeration, and the fact that ice cream’s ingredients (fat, sugar, and vanilla) made a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.

“The prohibition of the sale of liquor has had one important67 and easily visible effect,” writes one reporter at the dawn of Prohibition:

It has turned hundreds of thousands from beer and whisky to ice-cream and soda water. In one eastern city until recently there were three breweries. That city had been drinking about 300,000 barrels of beer yearly, which sold at retail for about $4,200,000. To-day the city is eating 3,000,000 gallons of ice-cream. It formerly drank about a barrel per capita each year. Now its annual consumption of ice-cream is about eight gallons per head. One of the breweries was making 65,000 barrels of beer every year, and is now making 800,000 gallons of ice-cream annually, with an increase in the value of its production of 150 per cent.

In fact, ice cream stood in for alcohol as a source of national comfort and diversion to such a degree that by 1929, ice cream consumption had grown by more than 100 million gallons annually,68 peaking at more than a million gallons per day. Its consumption dipped with the crash of the stock market later that same year, when the Great Depression ushered in a decade of depressing foods like mustard sandwiches and mock apple pies, which substituted crackers for apple slices.*69 Yet even then ice cream endured—not just in spite of rocky times but because of them.

There are disputing claims as to who created the flavor Rocky Road, but we do know that it was popularized by William Dreyer and Joseph Edy70, two California ice cream makers who began marketing it as a culinary metaphor in 1929 to help people cope with the Great Depression. Toppings at the time were primarily relegated to the point of sale and sprinkled on top, so the idea of mixing in broken chunks of marshmallows and nuts (originally walnuts but later almonds, which, the story goes, Dreyer cut up with sewing scissors borrowed from his wife) was pretty much unheard of. The name “Rocky Road” has since blended into the vernacular in the same way we’ve appropriated “Popsicle” to mean “frozen ice pop,” when really it’s a protected trademark owned by Unilever,71 the only brand that can legally sell “Popsicles”; but it used to be symbolic of comfort and perseverance—a reminder that life could still be sweet amid broken, rocky pieces.

Yet probably the most critical contribution to the comfort of ice cream and vanilla came during World War II, when the same scarcity that had once made them so elusive paradoxically helped make them more ubiquitous, as the wartime shortage of sugar, milk, and eggs around the globe essentially triggered an arms race for ice cream and dairy production that would ultimately bring ice cream to the masses and cement its place as a democratized comfort food for everyone.

The role of food in war, of course, was nothing new. John O’Bryan, in his book A History of Weapons: Crossbows, Caltrops, Catapults & Lots of Other Things That Can Seriously Mess You Up, explains how “the sick fucking Romans”72 weaponized bacon by setting pigs on fire and releasing hordes of flaming “war pigs” to break up enemy formations. The English not only threw beehives over castle walls or dropped them through specialized slits, called meurtrières or “murder holes,”73 to defend against sieges but also fended off attackers by dousing them with hot cooking oil and melted animal fat; and around the same time in feudal Japan, the Japanese were throwing sand cooked with chili peppers74 into people’s eyes to blind them.

During World War I, the United States converted fruit pits and nut shells into carbon for gas masks, which apparently worked better than any other raw material or ingredient except for coconut shells.75 And during World War II, the United States created a Fat Salvage Committee76 to convert bacon grease into bombs. The latter effort, supported by a Walt Disney cartoon featuring Pluto, Minnie Mouse, and a patriotic narrator urging housewives of America to salvage their used cooking fats to be turned into explosives:

Don’t throw away that bacon grease!77 Housewives of America, one of the most important things you can do is to save your waste kitchen fats: bacon grease, meat drippings, frying fats. We and our allies need millions of pounds of fats to help win the war, for fats make glycerin, and glycerin makes explosives! Every year, two billion pounds of waste kitchen fats are thrown away—enough glycerin for ten billion rapid-fire cannon shells, a belt one hundred and fifty thousand miles long, six times around the earth! A skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory, meat drippings sink Axis war ships, waste frying fats speed depth charges on their way to crush Axis submarines. Your pound of waste fat will give some boy at the front an extra clip of cartridges. Pour your waste kitchen fats in a clean, wide-mouth can. That’s right, not a glass jar or paper bag. Please strain the fats through a kitchen sieve. Keep in a cool, dark place so it won’t become rancid. When you have a pound or more, take it to your neighborhood meat dealer, who is patriotically cooperating.

Of course, the more savage—and effective—use of food in war wasn’t to hurl it at your enemies but to take it from them, a strategy that goes all the way back to the fourth-century Roman strategist Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, who called food the single most effective weapon in combat, “For armies are more often destroyed by starvation78 than battle, and hunger is more savage than the sword.”

What worked so well about starvation, explains Vegetius, is that unlike bacon bombs or incendiary pigs, it “fights from within,79 and often conquers without a blow.” So while hot oil and honeybees made a decent defense against sieges, the winning strategy was often to conserve your food and simply wait for your invaders to get hungry and go away.

And Vegetius wasn’t alone here. His strategy of hoarding food has been followed by everyone from George Washington, who allegedly carried an annotated copy of Vegetius into battle, to Napoleon, who, in perfect French stereotype, once boasted that all he needed to conquer Europe was fresh bread80 and in 1795 offered a twelve-thousand-franc reward81 for anyone who could improve the transport and preservation of military food supplies. It took fourteen years,82 but the prize was eventually claimed by a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert, who became the father of canned food and went on to write a cookbook, L’Art de conserver, pendant plusieurs années,83 toutes les substances animales et végétales (“The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years”).

By the same token, invading armies could do the same by staying out of range and cutting off the defending army’s food supply. And if you didn’t want to wait for your enemies to run out of food organically, you could always speed things along by sabotage, like when the French destroyed their own ovens84 and mills in 1636 to delay the advancing Spanish or when the United States (in perfect American stereotype) used flamethrowers and tactical herbicides85 to destroy crops and ground cover in Vietnam. (The most well known of these herbicides was Agent Orange, so named for the orange band86 used to identify it on fifty-five-gallon drums; however, we actually employed a rainbow of cancer-causing poisons,87 including Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent Purple, Agent White, and Agent Blue.)

Water for drinking and irrigation was another common target. “The crude contamination of water sources,88 including wells and reservoirs, meant for armies and civilian populations, with filth, cadavers, animal carcasses, and contagious materials, dates back to antiquity and continues even today,” write the authors of a 2008 chemical weapons report. The Assyrians poisoned enemies’ wells with rye fungus,89 the Athenians spiked drinking water with toxic flowers, the Germans dumped sewage into enemy reservoirs, and Confederate and Union soldiers sabotaged each other’s water supplies with dead animals.90 (The United States was also accused of intentionally bombing dikes and irrigation systems in Vietnam, though the State Department refuted such claims, admitting, “A few dikes have been hit by stray bombs91 directed at military associated targets nearby” but insisting the damage was minor and the bomb craters could “be repaired easily” by “a crew of less than 50 men with wheelbarrows and hand tools”).

So for thousands of years and across cultures, the military focus on food was primarily caloric: maximize the food intake of your own soldiers (and that of their horses and wives and children, who remained at home while much of the workforce was off fighting) and minimize that of your enemies. But that changed during World War I, when Herbert Hoover rallied Americans on the importance of food not just for calories during wartime but for comfort, officially classifying ice cream as “essential foodstuffs” during the war and making it an inseparable part of the American war machine from that point forward.

You see, before Hoover became the United States’ thirty-first president in 192992 (and before the United States entered World War I in 191793), he was a philanthropist who organized food relief in Belgium, which was caught in the middle of a conflict between Germany and Great Britain. Essentially, the entire nation of Belgium was on the brink of starvation94 in 1914 because the Germans had invaded on their way to France and were eating all the food—and the British navy was blocking shipments of food because they didn’t want it to go to the Germans and didn’t trust the Germans not to take it from the Belgians.

Fortunately, Hoover, who at the time was living in London, intervened and convinced both sides to let him organize food relief as a private citizen, essentially creating his own pirate nation with its own flag, naval fleet, and railroads.95 Between 1914 and 1919, Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium fed about 10 million civilian refugees in occupied France and Belgium, delivering, in total, about 4,998,059 tons96 of flour, grain, rice, beans, peas, pork, milk, sugar, and miscellaneous staples and food items valued at $861,340,244.21 (roughly the equivalent of $13,436,907,809.70 today).

But Hoover’s neutrality ended when the United States entered the war in 1917; his pirate organization continued to provide food relief as a neutral entity, but Hoover himself volunteered to head the newly established US Food Administration, hoping to do for his own country what he’d done for Belgium—and even offering to take the position without pay.97

He basically became czar of the US food supply, exerting totalitarian control over prices, distribution, and purchasing. But Hoover didn’t want control; part of the reason he’d insisted on taking the job without salary was to demonstrate sacrifice to the American people. So while nations on either side of the conflict imposed mandatory rationing to conserve food supplies—as they’d always done in wartime—Hoover saw this as un-American (“of the nature of dictatorship”)98 and appealed instead to the American “spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice.”99

Not only did he promise Americans that “food will win the war,”100 but he promised a win without losing the very freedoms and values they were fighting for—including simple pleasures like good old American ice cream and the freedom to purchase ingredients at will.

And Americans were eager to help. Within months he’d built a force of nearly half a million101 volunteers and convinced more than 10 million households to sign pledge cards vowing to “Hooverize” their meals by cutting down on staples such as wheat, fat, and sugar.

Corporate America also contributed. Restaurants and public eateries saved more than 250 million pounds of wheat,102 300 million pounds of meat, and 56 million pounds of sugar (enough to feed 8 million soldiers for a month) by observing days such as Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays; food manufacturers spent their own advertising budgets patriotically urging consumers to consume less103 of their commodities; and newspapers, retailers, and ad agencies volunteered their expertise and ad space—culminating in an estimated $19,417,600104 in donated services and displays. Even the White House pitched in by grazing sheep on the front lawn.105

The result was a tripling of US food exports almost instantaneously, producing 18 million tons of food exports106 in our first full year of war alone.

Yet the ice cream industry demanded more. An editorial in the May 1918 issue of The Ice Cream Review (an offshoot of Milwaukee’s Butter, Cheese & Egg Journal) spooned out sharp criticism for the scant availability of ice cream overseas (“If English medical men knew what ours do107 every hospital would keep ice cream on hand for patients”) and cried for Washington to intervene by subsidizing Allied ice cream factories across Europe: “Reports from nearly all the camps show108 that the per capita consumption of ice cream is nearly twice the figure for the average of the entire country. Are these boys going to miss something out of their lives when they go across? Yes, they are, and it is a shame that no one has thought to provide this home comfort . . .”

And it wasn’t just comfort the ice cream industry sought to provide for soldiers but good health and morale:

In this country every medical hospital uses ice cream as a food and doctors would not know how to do without it. But what of our wounded and sick boys in France? Are they to lie in bed wishing for a dish of good old American ice cream? They are up to the present, for ice cream and ices is taboo in France. It clearly is the duty of the Surgeon General or some other officer to demand that a supply be forthcoming.109

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The ice cream industry was still in its infancy. Flavors were still largely limited to chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, and ice cream on a stick wasn’t even invented yet; it wouldn’t be patented until 1923.110 Refrigeration was also in its infancy, and a lot of the cooling technologies that did exist depended on toxic gases like ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide111 (as opposed to Freon, which was introduced in the 1930s112 and merely killed the environment). So refrigeration was not only expensive and inadequate but potentially deadly.

Meanwhile, sugar was in shorter supply than Hoover had let on. Despite conservation efforts, the United States was still consuming far more of it113 per capita than her allies overseas—and before the war had imported the bulk of its sugar supply from Germany,114 which obviously wasn’t going to happen anymore; plus, not only had Germany stopped exporting sugar to the United States, but it had started taking it from their neighbors, too, making the market even more competitive.

So rather than building ice cream factories overseas, Hoover was eventually forced to ask manufacturers to reduce their use of sugar domestically—ruling in the summer of 1918: “Ice cream is no longer considered so essential115 as to justify free use of sugar in its manufacture.”

Still, the ice cream industry fared better than others, having to cut just 25 percent of its sugar use as opposed to a 50 percent cut for manufacturers of “less essential” commodities such as chocolate, soda, and chewing gum. And Hoover’s support for ice cream, coupled with the industrial boom of the postwar economy and a returning workforce who fondly recalled eating it in wartime camps and hospitals, helped the industry soar soon after the war ended.

In fact, we owe a lot of ice cream’s postwar popularity not just to Hoover, Yuengling, and Rocky Road but to a World War I veteran named Howard Johnson116 who, after returning from service in France, purchased a dilapidated drugstore with a soda fountain117 and brought it back to life with an ice cream recipe he purchased from a German street vendor.118 The recipe, which called for twice the typical butterfat,119 resulting in a creamier texture, quickly accounted for the bulk of his business, inspiring Johnson to develop a trademark twenty-eight flavors* and introduce premium ice cream to the masses with an eponymous chain of roadside restaurants strategically located along the nation’s expanding turnpike system. Howard Johnson’s (truncated as “HoJo’s”) might not be a household name anymore, as his concept of a “landmark for hungry Americans” eventually eroded into a hotel chain now owned by Wyndham, but at one point it was the largest food chain in America,120 with more than a thousand locations and a new location opening every nine days.

The postwar twenties also saw the debut of the Eskimo Pie;121 the Popsicle (originally called the “Epsicle”122 by its creator, Frank W. Epperson, whose children took to calling it “Pop’s Sicle”); and the ice cream bar, created in Youngstown, Ohio, by a candy maker named Harry Burt, who inserted lollipop sticks123 into bars of vanilla ice cream coated in chocolate and called it the Good Humor Sucker, later changed to the Good Humor Bar. Though it wasn’t the chocolate coating and sticks that made his bars a hit (or even his idea to sell them from refrigerated trucks that patrolled neighborhoods, ringing bells initially borrowed from his son’s bobsled124) as much as his iconic branding.

In fact, a lot of ice cream’s pure, wholesome image doesn’t come from the supposed whiteness of vanilla but from that of the Good Humor man, who roamed American neighborhoods in immaculate white trucks and uniforms, tipping his hat and projecting Burt’s vision of cleanliness and boy-next-door innocence.

“You are at all times while on duty to look your best,125” instructed one Good Humor training manual. “Always have a clean shave and neat haircut; wear a clean white shirt, black bow tie, black shoes neatly polished, clean white uniform, uniform cap and money changer. Your sales car must always be kept clean and in a neat condition.”

A few years earlier, around 1916, a Polish immigrant named Nathan Handwerker126 had done something similar to dispel rumors that his five-cent Coney Island hot dogs contained dog and horse meat by paying college students to wear white jackets and stethoscopes127 and hang around his stand so people would think his “Nathan’s Famous” hot dogs were endorsed by doctors. (Not to suggest that Nathan’s hot dogs were anything less than advertised, but the history of sausages isn’t exactly sterile; just a few decades earlier, in 1867, a book of recipes had cautioned readers, “Let me advise you never to use any sausages128 unless you know who made them, for of all things that are adulterated, the most offensive is the adulterated sausage. It is a fact that cannot be reasonably doubted that many sausages are composed in part of horse, hog and dog, together with diseased animals and many odds and ends by no means pleasant to think of . . .”)

But Good Humor’s chaste image wasn’t just a publicity stunt; in 1929, the company even stuck up to the Chicago mob by refusing to pay them protection money—and had part of their fleet and factory blown up as retaliation.129 Allegedly.

By the summer of 1921, authorities on Ellis Island had even begun handing out ice cream to immigrants as part of their first American meal. “Ellis Island Authorities Gently Lead Immigrants to Appreciation130 of Good Points of America by Introducing Them to the Pleasures of Ice Cream Sandwiches,” read one news lede. The article (“Ice Cream as Americanization Agent”) went on to describe how immigrants would often spread their ice cream on bread as if it were butter and suggest that the practice (of giving ice cream to immigrants, not spreading it like butter) could help fight the spread of communism:

It augurs well for the future of the ice cream industry131 and its further expansion that the latest comers to the country are acquiring a taste for the characteristic American dish even before they set foot in the streets of New York. It has always been a cause of complaint by many that the recent immigrants do not adopt American standards of living, but the Ellis Island authorities are sponsors for the assurance that in this one respect at least the adoption of the American standard is as instantaneous as could reasonably be expected. Then, too, who could imagine a man who is genuinely fond of ice cream becoming a Bolshevik? Even strawberry ice cream would arouse no latent anarchistic tendencies, while vanilla or peach would be soothing to the very reddest of the Reds. There is as yet no record of a dangerous plot being hatched over a dish of ice cream; the temperature is too low to promote incubation.

So by the time World War II came around, ice cream (still largely vanilla, which accounted for roughly 80 percent of the market132) had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. Once again the rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks133 as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars).*134 This time, however, the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines;135 delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.

And you’re goddamn right we won the war.

In 1942, when Japanese torpedoes struck the USS Lexington, then the second-largest aircraft carrier in the navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship—but not before breaking into the freezer and raiding all the ice cream.136 Survivors describe scooping it into their helmets before lowering themselves into shark-infested waters. US bomber crews used to make ice cream while flying over enemy territory137 after figuring out that they could strap buckets of ice cream mix to the outside of their planes during missions; by the time they landed, the mix would have frozen in the cold temperature of high altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence, if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. And soldiers on the ground took to using their helmets as mixing bowls138 to improvise ice cream from snow and melted chocolate bars.

Ice cream became so tied to national morale, in fact, that when the most decorated member of the Marine Corps,139 General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, called it a “sissy food” in the 1950s140 and tried to convince his marines that they’d be tougher on a diet of beer and whiskey, he drew so much national backlash that the Pentagon had to intervene with an official statement promising ice cream would be served no less than three times a week.

Even Fidel Castro couldn’t help but notice the transformative effect of ice cream on the American spirit. After a visit to New York in 1959, during which he was photographed licking an ice cream cone at the Bronx Zoo,141 he developed an obsession for American ice cream and dairy. In fact, while Americans were smuggling Cuban cigars into the United States, Castro was smuggling all twenty-eight flavors of Howard Johnson’s into Cuba and building the world’s largest ice cream parlor in Havana, a state-run “ice cream cathedral” named Coppelia142 (after the French ballet Coppélia)143 that occupied an entire city block and served state-subsidized ice cream to more than ten thousand daily customers who would wait in line for hours. Author Gabriel García Márquez even insists he once saw the dictator “[finish] off a good-sized lunch with 18 scoops144 of ice-cream.”

That last bit might sound a bit like magical realism, but stranger things have happened—like when the CIA tried to assassinate Castro145 by spiking his daily milkshake with botulinum toxin, only to have the toxic capsule break when the would-be assassin tried to remove it from its hiding place in the kitchen of the hotel Havana Libre, where it had frozen to the inside wall of a freezer. Or when Castro got into a fight with the French dairy expert André Voisin146 (known for such works as Rational Grazing and Soil, Grass and Cancer) because Voisin wouldn’t say Castro’s cheese was superior to French cheese—and then Voisin suddenly died of a heart attack in his Cuban hotel two weeks later. Or when Castro spent decades funding the genetic manipulation of a dairy “supercow” to usurp US milk production and the program was marked by failure (including botched plans to develop a breed of miniature cows the size of dogs,147 intended to be kept at home as pets) until the birth of a single cow named Ubre Blanca148 (“white udder”) who produced a record 241 pounds of milk in a single day149, more than four times that of typical American cows. (Castro called Ubre “our great champion,”150 assigned her a security detail in an air-conditioned stable—and after she passed in 1985 eulogized her with military honors151 and a life-size marble statue.)

But at least Castro recognized the contributions of dairy and ice cream; notice there’s no national US monument to ice cream. (There’s the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument outside Santa Cruz, but that has more to do with the indigenous Cotoni and Swiss dairy farmers in the 1900s.)152

None of this is to suggest that ice cream was the only food to provide comfort during the war—or that it was easily obtained. “No G.I. who passed through Europe in 1944 or 1945153 could have failed to notice the plight of its inhabitants,” writes historian Lee Kennett, who describes GIs going through chow lines two or three times to grab extra food for impoverished locals and guards turning their backs while food and fuel supplies mysteriously went missing.

Meanwhile, for American POWs being held captive overseas—where they were often forced to survive on things like maggot-infested rice, stale bread, rotten vegetables,154 and often far less or far worse—comfort food was, in the words of one POW, “as obtainable as a slice of the moon.”155

“Somebody listening in may have heard us talking156 about politics or sport, or anything else,” recalls British World War II veteran Harold Goulding, who spent more than three years in Japanese POW camps, “but I think really those were just symbols and we were really talking about food all the time.”

Other symbols, says Goulding, were less cryptic, like pictures of food they tore from old magazines and plastered to the walls of bunks in place of pinups.157

Recalls 4th Marine Jorg Jergenson, “Perhaps it was just our rundown physical conditioning,158 but, after the first year and a half or so, in general, girls and femininity did not, any longer, enter into the POW’s thought process.”

“Belly empty think of food,159 belly full think of women,” explains another POW.

Others passed the time by sharing recipes and filling scrap paper with menus for the elaborate Christmas dinners they’d cook if they made it back home.

“During the forty-three months that I was a POW160 I spent a lot of time just writing out food and holiday menus to keep myself somewhat sane and focused,” recalls Mess Sergeant Morris Lewis:

I don’t know if I did this because I was craving food or to keep myself up to the task of being the Mess Sergeant. . . . Imagine being asked by your soldiers to tell them what was going to be on the Christmas menu, all knowing that there would never be such a meal. But here we were with each soldier coming to me and asking if they could put their dish on the menu. It did give us all a sense of what we were remembering most and the will to go on another day. We were planning more than meals, we were providing a sense of hope for what should be or would be again someday.

And while these menus included far more than just vanilla ice cream, they also highlight what it is that makes it so comforting.

Explains Sue Shephard, who cataloged many of these menus in her paper “A Slice of the Moon,” presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, “Few tried to recall the elegant meals,161 in restaurants, of scallops and oyster, Dover soles, pheasant or Chateaubriand steaks. That wasn’t the food they wanted to remember; it was home food of childhood which represented unconditional love, without cares or responsibilities.”

And few foods represent that better than ice cream.

As food historian Margaret Visser so brilliantly describes in her book Much Depends on Dinner:

There are today two main kinds of nostalgia,162 and ice cream appeals to both of them. The first looks back to past time. Ice cream is the delight of children and therefore evocative of childhood memories; eating it makes people feel young and at least temporarily secure and innocent. Ice-cream stalls are decked with striped awnings and gingham, merchants use clowns, stuffed toys, cartoon characters, and balloons, not only to please children but also to draw adults to indulge in childhood for a while.

The second, she writes, looks back not just to past time but to past ideals and a sense of bygone simplicity:

Ice-cream sellers also like to pretend that they are very old-fashioned folks, and they give their premises not only a nursery air but a nineteenth-century look as well . . . black-and-white tiled floors (the tiles preferably hexagonal), bentwood chairs, “Tiffany” lamps, mirrors, cushioned booths, marble counters and so on.

Vanilla, in particular, takes us back to a time when life and ice cream felt simpler—even if the process of making ice cream might not have been: a time before the intrusion of artificial flavors, colors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and preservatives.

Clinical research seems to confirm this. Researchers testing the neurological effects of ice cream, chocolate, and yogurt163 found that only ice cream inhibited the human startle response across genders with statistical significance, leading them to theorize that there’s more at play than fat, sugar, and cold temperatures and that a large degree of ice cream’s comfort is psychological: a result of learned associations from memories pairing ice cream with things like summer, vacations, and friendship.

Not to get too Freudian, but it’s possible our comforting memories of ice cream and vanilla go back even further, all the way back to our very first comfort food, given what we learned in the first chapter about vanilla being a common flavor in human breast milk (and theoretically in amniotic fluid)—and the tendency of such flavors to impact lifelong food preferences. Indeed, human breast milk isn’t really much different from vanilla ice cream base, minus the ice crystals, considering that human milk is significantly sweeter than cow’s milk164 and also contains more fat.165

Both breast milk and vanilla have also separately been shown to have calming and pain reduction effects in infants given heel pricks,166 while another study found that when nursing mothers ingested vanilla just prior to breastfeeding, their infants “spent significantly more time attached to their mother’s nipple”167 and consumed 20 percent more milk; the study also found that when vanilla was added to bottled formula, infants tended to suck harder.

Perhaps that’s why, at least in one POW camp, “ice cream” was the code for “news from home”—because, writes ex-POW Russell Braddon, that was “what all prisoners of war crave more than anything else.”

Notes

1. “I’ve spent my life”: “Howard Johnson, 75, Founder of the Restaurant Chain, Dead,” New York Times, June 21, 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/06/21/archives/howard-johnson-75-founder-ot-the-restaurant-chain-dead-bought.html.

2. who call their lovers: Michael Oates and Larbi Oukada, Entre Amis, 6th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2012), 283.

3. in which case mon chou: Barbara Ensrud, The Pocket Guide to Wine and Cheese (Dorset, UK: New Orchard Editions, 1981), 90.

4. etymology of mon chou: Oates and Oukada, Entre Amis, 238; Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Vegetables: A Biography, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 51.

5. la femme fraise: Mary A. Knighton, “Down the Rabbit Hole: In Pursuit of Shōjo Alices, from Lewis Carroll to Kanai Mieko,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 40 (2011): 49–89.

6. c’est la saison: “Top Euphemisms for ‘Period’ by Language,” Clue, March 10, 2016, https://helloclue.com/articles/culture/top-euphemisms-for-period-by-language.

7. taken as a compliment: “Vanille,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/221378.

8. “Ah, you flavour”: Lady Holland, A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), 262.

9. “I love you”: “Cap o’ Rushes,” Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

10. the stereotype of sailors: “Salty,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/170227.

11. because LGBTQ populations: “Vanilla,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/221377.

12. world’s most popular: Anne Cooper Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1995), 59.

13. second most expensive: Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scribner, 2004), 430.

14. a kilo of which: “Mystery Solved: Biologists Explain the Genetic Origins of the Saffron Crocus,” Science Daily, March 11, 2019.

15. vanilla is the only: Patricia Rain, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Most Popular Flavor and Fragrance (New York: Penguin, 2004), 5.

16. more than 25,000 species: Ibid., 2.

17. It can take years: Ibid., 10.

18. which grow only: Ibid.

19. bloom only for a few hours: Ibid., 6.

20. their hermaphroditic sex parts: Ibid.

21. only one or two species: Ibid.

22. the melipona and euglossine bees: Ibid.

23. a 1 percent chance: Daphna Havkin-Frenkel and Faith C. Belanger, eds., Handbook of Vanilla Science and Technology, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2019), 15.

24. Nahuatl ahuacatl: Anju Saxena, ed., Himalayan Languages Past and Present (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 364.

25. a Spanish diminutive: Tim Ecott, Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 23.

26. Greek órχis: Anju Saxena, ed., Himalayan Languages Past and Present.

27. It wasn’t until 1841: Richard Bulliet et al., The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, 6th ed., vol. 2 (Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015), 680.

28. a title now held: Javier De La Cruz Medina et al., “Vanilla: Post-harvest Operations,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, June 16, 2009, 3.

29. Because its flowers: Rain, Vanilla, 7.

30. another six to nine months: Ibid., 8.

31. they need to be cured: Ibid., 9.

32. six hundred dollars per kilo: Richard Gray, “Nine Surprising Things Worth More than This Shimmering Metal,” BBC, May 31, 2018, www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180530-nine-surprising-things-worth-more-than-this-shimmering-metal.

33. six hundred blossoms: Melody M. Bomgardner, “The Problem with Vanilla,” Scientific American, September 14, 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-vanilla.

34. contain only about about 2 percent: Ibid.

35. a few kilos of vanilla beans: Nancy Kacungira, “Fighting the Vanilla Thieves of Madagascar,” BBC, August 16, 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/madagascar_vanillla.

36. Some farmers harvest: Lovasoa Rabary and Hereward Holland, “Madagascar Vanilla Crop Quality Suffers as Thieves Spark Violence,” Reuters, July 18, 2019.

37. more prone to disease: De La Cruz Medina, et al., “Vanilla: Post-harvest Operations.”

38. seek vigilante justice: Finbarr O’Reilly, “Precious as Silver, Vanilla Brings Cash and Crime to Madagascar,” New York Times, September 4, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/30/world/africa/madagascar-vanilla.html.

39. “tattoo” their beans: Ecott, Vanilla, 36.

40. up to 99 percent: Bomgardner, “The Problem with Vanilla.”

41. derived from things: Iain Fraser, “Choosy Consumers Drive a Near 1,000% Spike in Vanilla Prices,” The Conversation, February 27, 2017, https://theconversation.com/choosy-consumers-drive-a-near-1-000-spike-in-vanilla-prices-72780.

42. chloroform: Simon Cotton, “Vanillin,” Royal Society of Chemistry, February 29, 2008.

43. castoreum: C. Rose Kennedy, “The Flavor Rundown: Natural vs. Artificial Flavors,” Science in the News, Harvard University, September 21, 2015, http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/the-flavor-rundown-natural-vs-artificial-flavors.

44. In 2006, a Japanese scientist: Cotton, “Vanillin.”

45. the FDA’s definition: Kennedy, “The Flavor Rundown: Natural vs. Artificial Flavors.”

46. applies only to visible contamination: Kimberly Kindy, “Consumers Are Buying Contaminated Meat, Doctors’ Group Says in Lawsuit,” Washington Post, April 17, 2019.

47. a 2015 study: Andrea Rock, “How Safe Is Your Ground Beef?,” Consumer Reports, December 21, 2015, www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/how-safe-is-your-ground-beef.htm.

48. acceptable limits: “Food Defect Levels Handbook,” US Food and Drug Administration, September 7, 2018.

49. odds are: “CFR—Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21,” US Food and Drug Administration, April 1, 2019.

50. mix with wine or honey: Martin Elkort, The Secret Life of Food: A Feast of Food and Drink History, Folklore, and Fact (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1991), 101–02; Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, translated by Anthea Bell (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 749.

51. comes from the Arabic sharba: “Sherbet,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/177992.

52. sharbat, a drink made: “Hot Enough for You? Cool Off with a Brief History of Frozen Treats,” National Public Radio, August 17, 2016, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/17/490386948/hot-enough-for-you-cool-off-with-a-brief-history-of-frozen-treats.

53. The Chinese made sherbet: Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Food: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture and Social Influence from Hunter Gatherers to the Age of Globalization (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2013).

54. the Mongols made ice cream: Ibid.

55. underground pits insulated: Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 289.

56. “the Viennese are afraid”: Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven’s Letters: A Critical Edition with Explanatory Notes by Dr. A. C. Kalischer, translated with preface by J. S. Shedlock, vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1909), 10.

57. “P.S. The house I filled”: George Washington, The Papers of George Washington, edited by W. W. Abbot, vol. 1, 1784 – July 1784, University Press of Virginia, 1992, 420–21.

58. “there was not”: George Washington, The Diaries of George Washington, edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, vol. 4, 1784–June 1786, University Press of Virginia, 1978, 148–49.

59. later spending: John F. Mariani, The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 264.

60. Francis Bacon: Visser, Much Depends on Dinner, 293–94.

61. “stale and rancid”: Edgar Stanton Maclay, “The Social Side of Washington’s Administration,” Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 52, no. 1 (1918): 209.

62. “Refined sugar was sold”: Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla, 4.

63. Thomas Jefferson’s recipe: “Ice Cream,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/ice-cream.

64. “the average family”: Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla, 4.

65. many early American breweries: Ibid., 111. See also “Milk Products,” The Western Brewer and Journal of the Barley, Malt and Hop Trades 54, no. 4 (1920): 127.

66. Pabst Blue Ribbon: Kat Eschner, “How Some Breweries Survived Prohibition,” Smithsonian, April 7, 2017.

67. “The prohibition”: “Ice-Cream Instead of Beer,” The National Advocate 54, no. 12 (1919): 2.

68. ice cream consumption had grown: William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The Great Depression in America: A Cultural Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 253.

69. mock apple pies: Julia C. Andrews, Breakfast, Dinner, and Tea: Viewed Classically, Poetically, and Practically (New York: Appleton, 1860), 174; Lisa Abraham, “Recipe: Ritz Mock Apple Pie—an Old Time Favorite,” Seattle Times, June 23, 2009.

70. popularized by William Dreyer: “Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream,” Oral History Center, Bancroft Library, University of California, www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/oral-history-center/projects/dreyers.

71. owned by Unilever: Nathalie Jordi, “Don’t Use the P Word: A Popsicle Showdown,” The Atlantic, July 9, 2010, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/07/dont-use-the-p-word-a-popsicle-showdown/59412.

72. “the sick fucking Romans”: John O’Bryan, A History of Weapons: Crossbows, Caltrops, Catapults & Lots of Other Things That Can Seriously Mess You Up (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013), 73.

73. called meurtrières: Lise Hull, Understanding the Castle Ruins of England and Wales: How to Interpret the History and Meaning of Masonry and Earthworks (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 52.

74. the Japanese were throwing: Heather Arndt Anderson, Chillies: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2016), Apple Books ed.

75. converted fruit pits: Albert N. Merritt, War Time Control of Distribution of Foods (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 149.

76. Fat Salvage Committee: Adee Braun, “Turning Bacon into Bombs: The American Fat Salvage Committee,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/reluctantly-turning-bacon-into-bombs-during-world-war-ii/360298.

77. “Don’t throw away”: “Out of the Frying Pan into the Firing Line,” Walt Disney, 1942.

78. “For armies are”: N. P. Milner, Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 67.

79. “fights from within”: Ibid., 84.

80. all he needed: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), Apple Books ed.

81. offered a twelve-thousand-franc reward: “Nicolas Appert,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolas-Appert.

82. It took fourteen years: Ibid.

83. L’Art de conserver: Ibid.

84. the French destroyed: Standage, An Edible History of Humanity.

85. tactical herbicides: Jeanne Mager Stellman and Steven D. Stellman, “Agent Orange During the Vietnam War: The Lingering Issue of Its Civilian and Military Health Impact,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 6 (2018): 726–28.

86. Agent Orange: Ibid.

87. we actually employed: Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Board on the Health of Select Populations, Institute of Medicine, Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2012 (Ninth Biennial Update) (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014).

88. “The crude contamination”: Brian J. Lukey et al., eds., Chemical Warfare Agents: Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Therapeutics, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 53.

89. The Assyrians poisoned: Ibid.

90. Confederate and Union soldiers: “Water Conflict Chronology,” Pacific Institute, www.worldwater.org/conflict/list.

91. “A few dikes”: “Text of Intelligence Report on Bombing of Dikes in North Vietnam Issued by State Department,” New York Times, July 29, 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/07/29/archives/text-of-intelligence-report-on-bombing-of-dikes-in-north-vietnam.html.

92. before Hoover became: “Herbert Hoover,” The White House, www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/herbert-hoover.

93. before the United States entered: “Years of Compassion, 1914–1923,” Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, https://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/years-compassion-1914-1923.

94. the entire nation of Belgium: George H. Nash, “An American Epic: Herbert Hoover and Belgian Relief in World War I,” Prologue 21, no. 1 (1989), www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/hoover-belgium.html.

95. his own pirate nation: Seymour Morris, Jr., Fit for the Presidency?: Winners, Losers, What-ifs, and Also-rans (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 183.

96. delivering, in total: William Clinton Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1941), 39.

97. Hoover himself volunteered: “Sow the Seeds of Victory! Posters from the Food Administration During World War I,” National Archives, www.archives.gov/education/lessons/sow-seeds.

98. “of the nature”: Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919, 52.

99. “spirit of self-denial”: Ibid., 53.

100. “food will win the war”: “Sow the Seeds of Victory! Posters from the Food Administration During World War I.”

101. Within months he’d built: Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919, 87.

102. Restaurants and public eateries: Ibid., 97.

103. urging consumers to consume less: Ibid., 89.

104. an estimated $19,417,600: Ibid., 89–90.

105. Even the White House: “Sow the Seeds of Victory! Posters from the Food Administration During World War I.”

106. 18 million tons: Jeff Lyon, “The Misunderstood President,” Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1985.

107. “If English medical men”: The Ice Cream Review 1, no. 10 (1918): 2.

108. “Reports from nearly”: Ibid.

109. “In this country”: Ibid.

110. it wouldn’t be patented: Jefferson M. Moak, “The Frozen Sucker War: Good Humor v. Popsicle,” Prologue 37, no. 1 (2005), www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/spring/popsicle-1.html.

111. depended on toxic gases: Sam Kean, “Einstein’s Little-Known Passion Project? A Refrigerator,” Wired, July 23, 2017, www.wired.com/story/einsteins-little-known-passion-project-a-refrigerator.

112. introduced in the 1930s: Ibid.

113. the United States was still: Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919, 169.

114. before the war had imported: Ibid., 167.

115. “Ice cream is no longer”: “New Sugar Regulations,” United States Food Administration, Food Conservation Notes, no. 15, July 6, 1918.

116. Howard Johnson: Anthony Mitchell Sammarco, A History of Howard Johnson’s: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2013).

117. purchased a dilapidated drugstore: “Howard Johnson, 75, Founder of the Restaurant Chain, Dead.”

118. an ice cream recipe: Ibid.

119. The recipe, which called: “Howard D. Johnson,” Rosenberg International Franchise Center, Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, University of New Hampshire, https://www.unh.edu/rosenbergcenter/howard-d-johnson.

120. it was the largest: “The Last Howard Johnson’s Restaurant Is for Sale: The Demise of a Once-Great Food Chain,” The Economist, February 16, 2017, www.economist.com/united-states/2017/02/16/the-last-howard-johnsons-restaurant-is-for-sale.

121. debut of the Eskimo Pie: Moak, “The Frozen Sucker War: Good Humor v. Popsicle.”

122. originally called the “Epsicle”: Ibid.

123. who inserted lollipop sticks: “Good Humor Ice Cream Truck,” Smithsonian Institution, June 21, 2011, www.si.edu/newsdesk/snapshot/good-humor-ice-cream-truck.

124. bells initially borrowed: “100 Years of Good Humor,” Good Humor, www.goodhumor.com/us/en/our-history.html.

125. “You are at all times”: “NMAH-AC0451–0000012,” Gold Bond–Good Humor Collection, National Museum of American History, Archives Center.

126. around 1916, a Polish immigrant: Peter Smith, “The Stunt That Launched Nathan’s Famous Stand on Coney Island,” Smithsonian, July 3, 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-stunt-that-launched-nathans-famous-stand-on-coney-island-312344.

127. paying college students: David Gerard Hogan, Selling ’em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 17.

128. “Let me advise you”: S. S. Schoff and B. S. Caswell, The People’s Own Book of Recipes (Kenosha, WI: Schoff and Winegar, 1867), 189.

129. had part of their fleet: Ron Grossman, “Flashback: Good Humor Delighted Generations with Its Curbside Delivery of Ice Cream Bars—and Not Even the Mob Could Stop It,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 2019.

130. “Ellis Island Authorities Gently Lead”: “Ice Cream as Americanization Agent,” The Soda Fountain 20, no. 7 (1921): 81.

131. “It augurs well”: Ibid.

132. which accounted for roughly: Mariani, The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, 518.

133. endorsing carrots on sticks: Jill Reilly, “In My Day, All We Got for Easter Was a Carrot on a Stick: Newsreel Reveals What Children Got Instead of Chocolate Eggs in WW2,” Daily Mail, April 2, 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123981/In-day-got-Easter-carrot-stick-World-War-Two-showreel-reveals-children-swapped-ice-cream-carrots.html.

134. mock fudge: Lee Edwards Benning, The Cook’s Tales: Origins of Famous Foods and Recipes (Old Saybrook: Globe Pequot, 1992), 119.

135. building pop-up ice cream factories: Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla, 143.

136. breaking into the freezer: Ibid., 142.

137. US bomber crews used to make: McGee, On Food and Cooking, 43.

138. soldiers on the ground: “Transcript of an Oral History Interview with Richard T. Meland, Communications, Anti-Aircraft Artillery, Army, World War II,” Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center, 1995, 14.

139. the most decorated member: “Gen. Chesty Puller Dies; Most Decorated Marine,” New York Times, October 12, 1971, www.nytimes.com/1971/10/12/archives/cert-chesty-puller-diesi-most-decoralted-marine-commissioned-at-20.html.

140. called it a “sissy food”: Betty Cuniberti, “Celebrating 40 Years of 31 Flavors,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1985.

141. during which he was photographed: Meyer Liebowitz, “Fidel Castro Eating Ice Cream,” April 2, 1959, Getty Images, www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cuban-president-fidel-castro-eats-an-ice-cream-cone-as-he-news-photo/2967514.

142. “ice cream cathedral”: Myles Karp, “The History of Cuba’s Ongoing Obsession with Ice Cream,” Vice, May 10, 2018, www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbkje8/history-of-ice-cream-cuba-fidel-castro-ubre-blanca-coppelia.

143. (after the French ballet Coppélia): Jason Motlagh, “The Future of Cuba’s Socialist Ice-Cream Cathedral,” The Guardian, April 14, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/future-of-coppelia-cuba-socialist-ice-cream-cathedral.

144. “[finish] off a good-sized lunch”: Gabriel García Márquez, “A Personal Portrait of Fidel,” in Fidel Castro, Fidel: My Early Years, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Álvarez Tabío (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2005), 13.

145. the CIA tried to assassinate: Anthony Boadle, “Closest CIA Bid to Kill Castro Was Poisoned Drink,” Reuters, July 5, 2007, www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-cia/closest-cia-bid-to-kill-castro-was-poisoned-drink-idUSN0427935120070705.

146. when Castro got into a fight: Guillermo Cabrena Infante, Mea Cuba (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 324.

147. a breed of miniature cows: Peter Fritsch and Jose De Cordoba, “Castro Hopes to Clone a Famous Milk Cow,” Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2002, www.wsj.com/articles/SB1021927734453270880.

148. Ubre Blanca: Karp, “The History of Cuba’s Ongoing Obsession with Ice Cream.”

149. 241 pounds of milk: Fritsch and De Cordoba, “Castro Hopes to Clone a Famous Milk Cow.”

150. “our great champion”: Fidel Castro, “Fidel Castro Addresses Medical Students,” Havana Domestic Television Service, March 12, 1982, Castro Speech Data Base, Latin American Network Information Center, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1982/19820314.html.

151. eulogized her with military honors: Karp, “The History of Cuba’s Ongoing Obsession with Ice Cream.”

152. Cotoni and Swiss dairy farmers: Samantha Clark, “Santa Cruz County Supervisors Support Cotoni-Coast Dairies as Name for Proposed National Monument,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 23, 2015, www.santacruzsentinel.com/2015/06/23/santa-cruz-county-supervisors-support-cotoni-coast-dairies-as-name-for-proposed-national-monument.

153. “No G.I. who passed”: Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 197.

154. maggot-infested rice: Sue Shephard, “A Slice of the Moon,” in Food and the Memory: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2000, edited by Harlan Walker (Devon, UK: Prospect, 2001), 226–29.

155. “as obtainable”: Quoted in ibid., 225.

156. “Somebody listening in”: Ibid., 223.

157. pictures of food: Ibid., 235.

158. “perhaps it was just”: Quoted in Jan Thompson, “Prisoners of the Rising Sun: Food Memories of American POWs in the Far East During World War II,” in Food and the Memory: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2000, edited by Harlan Walker (Devon, UK: Prospect, 2001), 274, 280.

159. “Belly empty”: Quoted in Shephard, “A Slice of the Moon,” 235.

160. “During the forty-three months”: Quoted in Thompson, “Prisoners of the Rising Sun,” 278–79.

161. “Few tried to recall”: Shephard, “A Slice of the Moon,” 233.

162. “There are today”: Visser, Much Depends on Dinner, 315–16.

163. Researchers testing: Peter Walla et al., “Food-Evoked Changes in Humans: Startle Response Modulation and Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs),” Journal of Psychophysiology 24, no. 1 (2010): 25–32.

164. human milk is significantly sweeter: Mark Kurlansky, Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

165. contains more fat: Harold H. Williams, “Differences Between Cow’s and Human Milk,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 175, no. 2 (1961): 104–07.

166. calming and pain reduction effects: Mahnaz Jebreili et al., “Comparison of Breastmilk Odor and Vanilla Odor on Mitigating Premature Infants’ Response to Pain During and After Venipuncture,” Breastfeeding Medicine 10, no. 7 (2015): 362–65.

167. “spent significantly more time”: Julie A. Mennella and Gary K. Beauchamp, “The Human Infants’ Response to Vanilla Flavors in Mother’s Milk and Formula,” Infant Behavior and Development 19, no. 1 (1996): 13–19.

168. “what all prisoners of war”: Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 159.

Written by Matt Siegel  in "The Secret History of Food", Ecco/Harper Collins, 2021, USA, excerpts chapter 6. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.