by Matt Siegel
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: