Curly Q

I love ice cream! Over the years I have traveled in 135 countries, and I think I have had ice cream in all of them. Granted, in many of the countries, the ice cream was not memorable.

Cheryl’s father, Maurice, ate a bowl of ice cream every night. FYI, I don’t eat ice cream every day. I learned a lesson about ice cream while in college: ice cream everyday makes you fat. I don’t know how Maurice kept from being fat.

When I began my proton therapy treatments in early January, my radiation oncologist and his staff insisted that I not lose any weight and urged me to eat more calories than normally. This was important for the dosage calculations that the technicians had made for my treatments. Being treated for cancer was no fun, but I was going to have fun with this extra calories challenge.

I had surgery in November, and I was inactive afterwards and boom, Thanksgiving weekend happened. Yep, I gained weight. Then, I had the second surgery in December, and once again there was a lot of food around during family visits. So, my weight was already up when they coached me about the importance of maintaining my weight. Bottom line—I ate lots of ice cream during my seven weeks of treatments. By the way, my favorite ice cream treat is a chocolate malt which is difficult to find these days.

Back to my college lesson—during one year in college I worked for Borden’s ice cream factory in Jackson, Mississippi and gained 15 pounds. I worked on the clean-up crew which came to work late afternoon each weekday. For perspective, I grew up in a home where I was taught that no food should be wasted. So I saw it as my personal responsibility to eat as much of the ice cream that was left in yards and yards of stainless pipes as possible. It was soft and easy to eat, and man did I eat a plethora of ice cream. After a month of stuffing myself, I finally realized that I had to eat that soft FREE ice cream in moderation. But I still gained the fifteen pounds.

Shame on the major ice cream producers for marketing “Dairy Desserts.” You pick up a carton of Breyer’s Rocky Road and think that you have purchased ice cream. Wrong. To be classified as “ice cream” the product must contain 10% milk fat. What you have purchased is a dairy dessert—so designated in small print at the bottom of the carton. It is less expensive to manufacture, but the price of these products did not go down. Now the producers will argue that the price of a carton of ice cream has not increased in recent years, but mind you, they have reduced the size of the carton by 25%.

When you make homemade ice cream you do not fill the container completely with your ice cream recipe because the paddle turning inside during the freezing process adds air to your ice cream. Also, in fast food restaurants their ice cream machines have a large paddle turning continuously to add air to their product. Air is free, so the lighter the ice cream, the more air—and incidentally more margin. A gallon of ice cream must weigh 4.5 lbs/gallon to pass the USDA standards. The cheaper the ice cream, the more air that is in it. When deciding on an ice cream product the greater the weight the richer the product.

While working for Chick-fil-A I learned that their soft serve is “Ice Dream” because it is not real ice cream. When Cheryl and I were dating one of our most favorite treats was a strawberry soda from Dairy Queen. I have eaten a lot of ice cream from Dairy Queen, but only recently have I discovered that it is not ice cream after all. It only has 5% milk fat.

The sweet spot of this story is this: what you see is not necessarily what you wanted to get. I am reading in the book of Samuel now, and the following verse reminded me of a sweet principle: don’t let the curly Q on the top of a Dairy Queen cone fool you—because it is not really ice cream but a dairy dessert.

But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." I Samuel 16:7