There's No Crying in Ice Cream
It’s about one minute into the 6-minute film and I am crying. I’m trying not to sniffle too loudly. I’m surreptitiously wiping my face with the sleeve of my jacket. I’m ducking my head a little like I’m trying to work out a kink in my neck. I don’t embarrass easily. In grade school I signed up for every talent show despite having no discernable “talent” except making up lip synch routines to “Weird Al” Yankovic songs. I’d like to say I was a cool person ahead of my time. I would sure like to say that.
So it surprised and annoyed me a little that I was trying to hold it together watching this informational video here of all places: The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory in Waterbury, Vermont.
We were taking a short trip up to Burlington, Vermont and read that the Ben & Jerry’s factory was on the way. I had never been and my partner had visited years ago when he was in high school. Ice cream is a staple of our collective diet. And Ben & Jerry’s is some of the most seriously high-test dairy dessert on the planet. Should be fun and interesting, we agreed. I mean, after Disney World, an ice cream factory should be the happiest place on earth, right?
Friends since elementary school, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield eventually found their way into the ice cream game after college. Armed with a correspondence course on ice cream making from Pennsylvania State’s creamery in 1977, the pair began churning out vats of the sweet, creamy stuff. From the jump, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was not your typical two scoops of vanilla in a waffle cone. Ben had a condition called “anosmia,” a lack of smell. While this might have been great in the locker room, in the food service industry-not so much. To compensate, Ben relied on mouthfeel and texture, which led the duo to incorporate large chunks of add-ins such as brownies, cookie dough, fruit, chocolate etc. that eventually became part of their unique, ultimately iconic approach to ice cream. Ben & Jerry opened their ice cream store in 1978 in a renovated gas station in downtown Burlington Vermont. Today their pints are sold in over 33 countries and more than 200 parlors in the United States.
The factory complex sits high on a hill overlooking beautiful Vermont fields and mountains, as per Vermont state regulations, Section IV, paragraph 9: all scenery must be idyllic; mountains should maintain a 5 o’clock shadow of snow on their peaks at all times. Vermont does not mess around. Cute, colorful decore with an emphasis on the signature dairy cow motif is carried throughout the main buildings and grounds. Our factory guide, Molly, gamely threw in the requisite scripted cow puns. I sympathized. I imagine that the fourth or fifth time you have to tell people to “Moooove this way and follow me,” the line has lost some (most) of its zip. It’s really the committed show person who can pull it out of the Dad Joke nosedive.
After watching (or, in my case, weeping through) the short film about the founding of the company, Molly leads us into a second floor galley area where you’re able to look down into a room about the size of a high school gymnasium. It’s here where all the ice cream magic comes together, helped along by a series of hulking stainless steel machines. On the walls or suspended from the ceiling are signs with designated numbers that correspond to each step of the ice cream making process.
Photographs of the area are not allowed. Molly verbally walks us through the ten steps to producing one pint of Ben & Jerry’s. There is only about 6 of us on the tour and Molly seems like a very pleasant, college-aged person who is just showing up to do her factory tour job without a lot of hassle. So even though I am dying to inject jokes about Oompa Loompas or ask where they keep the Snozzberries, I actually read the room for a change and politely listen.
We end the tour in The Flavor Room. I again squelch the urge to turn to my partner and whine, “I want an Ooompa-Loompa nowwww!” It’s a small space that includes a kitchenette behind a glass wall.
This is a replica of the first tasting room Ben and Jerry worked in decades ago. Molly explains that the resident Flavor Guru uses the space to work.
“How do you get the Flavor Guru gig?” I ask.
“It’s a lot of school in stuff like gastronomy and other food sciences and math. They are high-demand jobs as you can imagine.” I nod and cast a glance at my partner. The look on my face says that I am already imagining what it would be like to introduce myself at parties or to the person working the hotel check-in desk as a Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Guru. I’m also working out how to make the letters fit on a vanity license plate. He responds with a curt shake of his head: “No.” Math, science, logic, analytics, physics, anything involving spatial relations or numbers, these are my sworn nemeses. For instance, I can’t park our average-sized car correctly—I’m either outside of the lines or sticking out—because of SPACE MATH, not user-error. I’m constantly ordering things like hand cream in obscene volumes (my skin will remain creamy smooth through the end times!) because of QUANTITY MATH. I’m pretty sure all of it is out to get me, so thanks for nothing big Greek jerks who invented it all to begin with.
We all get free samples in tiny paper cups of a flavor called Churray for Churros, a blend of sweet cream and cinnamon; a fireball in dairy form.
“I bet I could be the Flavor Guru based on my creativity alone,” I say to him between bites. Without stopping he gives a curt shake of his head, “No.”
“Dream killer,” I mutter and wander around taking photos.
I stand in front of the glass wall of the kitchenette and think about these two friends mixing pints, listening to a Grateful Dead tune on the radio, probably laughing their asses off because while their other friends were taking jobs at law firms and hospitals or universities, they were hanging out making ice cream. The film about the company hits all the businessy bullet points: when they moved out of their first “scoop shop” to a bigger location; how they partnered with local dairy farmers for their milk supply; the first “free cone” day in 1978 that has continued until the present (minus 2020 through 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic); up to when they sold the company to Unilever, but retained a say in the board and, especially, control over how resources would be used to support social justice and other causes.
Near the end of the film there is a montage of people enjoying Ben & Jerry’s from all over the world, at festivals and concerts and outdoor markets and from trucks in the park and in scoop shops. “Ice cream brings people together!” the narrator says in a honeyed voice and that’s when I am squeezed in the emotional nards; I have to pretend to cough so I can wipe the tears streaming down my cheeks. It all hits me. This shouldn’t really work or be a big deal. It’s ICE CREAM. But it breaks me open. Because I’m tired of all the practiced cynicism and jaded attitudes and trendy apathy. Give me the cow puns and groovy vibes and the plucky optimism of a guy with no sense of smell launching a damn food business. I want to wake up every day knowing that there is a for-reals-money-paid-J.O.B. for someone holding the title of Flavor Guru. This is the world I want to live in. One where a basic bowl of ice cream can suddenly make things a lot less complicated and a whole lot sweeter.
Lens Zen!
I’m seeing a lot of people struggling these days: Daylight saving just kicked in, announcing the start of seasonal depression; a couple of wars, and I don’t know about you, but I prefer my number of wars at zero; and a general sense that humaning is getting harder and harder by the minute. I spotted this down a side street in Burlington and was grateful for the reminder. Sending it out to you all. X!
What a piece! There's so much heart and humor in this article. It might be my favorite thing you've ever written--which is really saying something!
Your work is so infused with humanity and hope and I just love it. It's like going home for Thanksgiving.
Also, I'm now dying for some ice cream.
I had no idea that Ben had no sense of smell! Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is some of the best out there. My uncle lives in Burlington, so he would talk about going to see the facility. I probably did a tour when very young, but I have no memory of it… Next New England trip, must put it on the list.