I’m about to sound like an ice cream NIMBY.
There is a rise of ice cream shops in my neighborhood that I don’t like. They have flavors like “Roasted Beets & Fresh Mint.” Half of their ice cream is non-dairy but it’s hard to figure out which half. There’s a flavor of ice cream that is unexpectedly blue, with an acknowledgment in the description (“Heads up, this ice cream is blue”) but no explanation as to why. It’s not a feature! The ice cream’s just blue. They probably ground little pieces of bluebonnet into it even though that’s supposed to be a crime.
I’m fine with these ice cream places existing. I would happily pop into each once a month. But most often, when I want to walk and get ice cream at night, I’m not looking for a hint of thyme grown by a local artisan. I want normal, God-fearing ice cream made with milk from a cow and flecked with highly processed cookie dough.
Again, the problem is not that these places exist in my neighborhood. I am fine with these ice cream places. They have every right to this land that I do. The problem is that other places don’t exist. There is nowhere I can walk to get normal ice cream. I can go drive through Dairy Queen, but I live in a city. I’m two and a half miles from the center of the tenth-most populous metropolis in the country. I should be able to walk to get some good ice cream.
Another issue is that I don’t know how to describe these ice cream shops. There’s no convenient word for it. In 2008, as a 13-year-old, I would have called them “gay.” Obviously, I’m not going to call them gay anymore. That’s insulting to LGBT people. For two reasons! Queer people shouldn’t be associated with roasted beet ice cream. Nobody should be associated with roasted beet ice cream.
A few weeks ago, my brother described the crackers his wife had bought as “liberal.” I got a kick out of this. Not because the phrase “liberal crackers” calls to mind whatever’s happening at Columbia, although yes, that too, but because I knew exactly what category of cracker he was talking about. Those fucking Nut-Thins, or as he later confirmed, something featuring flax seed. If you like ‘em, good for you, but you’re probably lying. You’re probably feeling pressured by the echoes of Heroin Chic to eat things that taste like a piece of bread took a shit. There are two liberal cracker problems in this country, and only one of them involves antisemitism. The more insidious of the two is Nut-Thins, and the unspoken pressure on Millennial women to buy them.
Could we call these ice cream places liberal? No. That’s the problem. Because when I say liberal ice cream, you think of Ben & Jerry’s, or you think of the good local ice cream shops where all the employees’ Instagram bios acknowledge that the pictures were taken on indigenous ancestral lands (and you know this, without even looking at the Instagram bios in question). Those are good ice cream shops! I don’t care about an ice cream shop’s political persuasion. I’m pretty liberal myself! “Liberal” works as a pejorative because it’s a funny thing to use as a pejorative. It works as a pejorative for crackers because you know what it means. With ice cream shops, you don’t expect it to mean they’re mixing lavender in with cucumbers and expecting you to treat it as a dessert. You just think I’m talking about a place having a Pride parade fundraiser bucket where most shops keep their tip jar. “Lib” might work, but that’s more for a liberal who’s gone over the edge on the internet. That’s a noun. We need an adjective.
I have no solution here. I have no way of handily identifying that kind of ice cream shop. I’m simply pointing out the problem, and posting it here, on one of the million most-trafficked websites in the world (I hope), praying that someone will give me an answer. What is the word for the kind of ice cream shop that treats sunflower seed oil like it’s peanut butter?
(No, I’m not talking about Jeni’s. Jeni’s does some of this stuff, but Jeni’s does it well. I would kill for a Jeni’s in place of one of the two neighborhood ice cream shops around me. I might do just that. [The other one has a good ambience, so it can stay.])
