1. Consume Mass Quantities I keep between fifteen and thirty dollars' worth of ice cream in my freezer at all times. Let me be clear: This ice cream is not for guests, and most of it will never be consumed by anyone. These pints are my emergency backup system in case the nearby San Lorenzo River jumps the levee and floods the city of Santa Cruz or a new crack opens along the Loma Prieta segment of the San Andreas Fault. I prefer my ice cream fresh, and I detest the little ice hairs that form when a carton has been left in the back of the icebox too long. But when I've spent a long day chaperoning twenty kids on a four-hour kindergarten field trip to some buggy swamp, museum, or waste-reclamation center, I'm not above scraping tiny icicles off the top and letting a bowl of Old Tyme Vanilla sit out for five minutes until it thaws to an acceptable degree. Then I will devour it in less than two minutes. On any given day I have so many containers of ice cream stacked in my freezer, I can't find the bread, broccoli, unshelled soybeans, or other staples my family needs to survive. If we're low on freezer space, I sometimes shove these lowly vegetables in the trash without telling anyone. I've allowed the ice cream to dominate; pints and quarts are stacked vertically and shoved into crevices horizontally. Each time I open the freezer doors, a quart of vanilla tumbles to the floor, landing on my foot. An ice cream maker, left over from my stash of wedding gifts, occupies a third of my freezer. It has traveled across the country with me twice. My husband wishes I would haul it out of there and put it in the cabinet. That is out of the question. In order to make ice cream, the machine must be kept frozen for at least twenty-four hours. On any given night, I could wake up with a craving for rum raisin ice cream, the incapacitating kind, soaked with boozy flavor. Most store-bought rum raisin is ersatz; you could eat seven gallons of the stuff and not feel the slightest buzz. My homemade version could knock you out cold in a single scoop. I like to think of it as a twenty-first-century "remedy"-like the drug-filled concoctions at unscrupulous Victorian-era pharmacy soda fountains. My rum-soaked concoction once sent my husband careening into our living room furniture. I also make a vanilla that's more of a frozen custard, an eggier version with real Tahitian vanilla and a dense consistency, very different from the whipped-cream confections you will find in most ice creams. I have taste-tested dozens of store-bought pints and can proudly say that mine is the perfect topping for vodka-crusted apple pie. Here are a few more facts I'm only vaguely ashamed to admit: I live within walking distance of three high-end supermarkets that carry half a dozen artisanal brands and several locally made pints. I visit one of the shops at least daily, checking on the supply of my favorite flavors. I have also "liked" the local ice cream parlors on Facebook just to track their daily flavors on my news feeds. One local creamery has four different scoop shops but, in a nod to Santa Cruz's laid-back style, has an online listing for flavors in just one of those shops. As a result I must set aside ten to fifteen minutes after dinner on summer nights just to call around and see which has the dark chocolate salted caramel. I understand the hypocrisy of my choices. While I limit my daughter's consumption of sugar to one dessert a day or less, including juice drinks, I have always thought that the one and only benefit of being an adult is that I can choose what I put in my mouth. If I must walk an extra thirty minutes a day or suffer through a Jillian Michaels video twice a week to offset my high calorie intake, so be it. I am neither proud nor ashamed of the amount of time and energy I spend on my preoccupation with ice cream. After all, I share an obsession with millions of other Americans. Every man, woman, and child in this nation consumes, on average, almost twenty-two pounds of ice cream per year. That works out to be roughly 26,400 calories' worth of ice cream. If I'm in some way responsible for helping make this country the world leader in consumption of frozen treats larded with mouthwatering butterfat, I happily accept that honor. Our collective obsession with ice cream goes all the way back to our founding fathers. If my ice cream consumption seems outrageous, consider George Washington, who spent two hundred dollars on ice cream during the summer of 1790. That's the equivalent of about three thousand bucks today, if you factor in inflation. Thomas Jefferson, whose Declaration of Independence is one of the greatest pieces of persuasive and declarative writings in history, also wrote the first American ice cream recipe, a French-inspired vanilla dessert that called for two bottles of cream, six egg yolks, and half a pound of sugar. Jefferson even had an icehouse built at Monticello, in large part because he wanted to keep his treats from turning into a puddle of goo. "Man and woman eating giant ice cream cone." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935-1945. My almost daily ice cream consumption has warped my mind and reset my taste buds. Part of the problem is that I eat so much of it-and ice cream is more like a drug than any other food. Researchers have studied the brains of addicts like me and have found that the more ice cream you eat, the more you have to eat it to regain that "high." Eat too much high-fat or high-sugar food and it's harder to feel that pleasure reward activate in your brain. "This down-regulation pattern is seen with frequent drug use, where the more an individual uses the drug, the less reward they receive from using it," according to Dr. Kyle Burger, coauthor of the study conducted by the Oregon Research Institute, which focuses on human behavior in relation to health issues, including obesity. "Repeated, overconsumption of high-fat or high-sugar foods may alter how the brain responds to those foods in a way that perpetuates further intake." This high-fat drug has been in my bloodstream for as long as I can remember. But I've become more fussy about my fixes as the years have passed. I can remember eating generic Rocky Road with the jagged little nuts, the sticky and cloying chocolate, and those slippery, well-chilled little indestructible marshmallows that squeaked between my teeth like cheese curds. It makes no sense now, but I loved every bite. I was easy to please. Most anything could transport me, even my father's squat and staticky black-and-white TV set, in front of which I'd find myself swept away by Space: 1999, a television program featuring Barbara Bain and Martin Landau clinging to the moon as it hurtles through outer space, having gone off its orbital rails thanks to exploding nuclear waste. How did I grow up into an ice cream snob? It isn't just my fault. Part of the problem is social conditioning and changing standards. To be more specific, my taste buds and my brain were forever altered by the introduction of "gourmet" Ben & Jerry's flavors in the 1980s. One winter afternoon I had a chance to talk with one of the men who blew up my taste buds-Jerry Greenfield, the Jerry in Ben & Jerry's. "The universe of Ben & Jerry's flavors opened a whole other universe," he told me during a phone chat while he was on vacation in Austin, Texas. Jerry gives all the credit for the ice cream renaissance to his cohort, Ben Cohen. In fact, Jerry tells me that his partner will be remembered as the greatest ice cream flavor creator ever. I can't help it-I laugh with enthusiasm and giddiness to be talking this kind of history with one of modern ice cream's founding fathers. "You can laugh if you want, but it's true," he admonished. His scolding surprised me. He was just a bit more prickly than I imagined he'd be. "But . . . don't you think people will remember you the same way?" I asked him. He was quiet, as if taken aback at the reminder of his own legacy in the ice cream world. "I never created a flavor," he admitted. "I was making ice cream to Ben's specifications and taste." During all my college evenings spent eating Phish Food and watching Friends, I imagined Jerry to be a bit more creative, free-spirited, and mellow, the type of person who would allow you to weep on his shoulder after a bad breakup. But there's the difference between the product and the person who creates the product. It was the tubs of sugar and fat that brought me comfort, not the man himself. Jerry said he grew up eating supermarket brands like Breyers, which was considered a classy choice in the 1950s and 1960s because of its "all natural" ingredients. Before Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream scene was much more staid, consistent, and predictable-and brands like Breyers exemplified comforting, unchallenging food choices and convenience at a time when most Americans lived in daily fear of nuclear incineration at the hands of the Soviet Union. Without Breyers and other brands setting the tone, people like Ben and Jerry would have had no context for their acts of insurrection. Breyers dates back to 1866, when William Breyer started the business by making ice cream in his kitchen and delivering it by horse-drawn wagon in Philadelphia. Bassetts Ice Cream-launched in 1861-actually predates Breyers as America's oldest ice cream company. But Bassetts, which still sells its spectacular eggless Philadelphia-style flavors at the Reading Terminal Market and select retail spots, never had the distribution success that Breyers enjoyed, and Breyers became the best-selling American ice cream for generations. West Coast dwellers have enjoyed the similarly named Dreyer's. The brand, founded in 1928 by Joseph Edy and William Dreyer, was originally named Edy's, a name that stuck until 1948, when Dreyer built a large ice cream factory in Oakland and changed the company name. Dreyer's still markets its ice cream as Edy's on the East Coast, but the name change has caused confusion in other parts of the country. In the 1980s, the Breyers and Dreyer's companies had a bitter war over shelf space in Southern California's supermarket cases after Breyers, based on the East Coast, started selling its merchandise out west. It's not surprising the two businesses competed with each other so much. Sometimes I feel like I've spent half my life trying to tell these brands apart in the supermarket freezer section. No question about it: Breyers and Dreyer's are, truly, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of mass-produced ice cream. And if you aren't confusing the brands, you will spend your time struggling with their varying strategies regarding punctuation. Breyers does not carry a possessive, while Dreyer's, for some nefarious reason, has an apostrophe after the r. When I am buying ice cream, the last thing I want to feel is confused. Perhaps out of hurt pride or a wish for revenge, Breyers, in vintage 1980s commercials, accused Dreyer's of using less-than-natural ingredients, including corn syrup. In a rather lame effort to avoid mix-ups, Breyers used to have advertisements proclaiming that its name was "Breyers with a B." If you wanted more variety, you needed to go to a scoop shop, like Baskin-Robbins, which offered its famous thirty-one flavors. Then, in 1960, Reuben Mattus, a Bronx-based street peddler of homemade ice creams, decided to add some intrigue and complication to this rather boring ice cream landscape. After pushing his wares in a horse-drawn wagon on hot, dirty avenues for years, he decided to rebrand. He and his wife, Rose, came up with the exotic-sounding, and utterly meaningless, name of HSagen-Dazs and started charging premium prices for the faux-Danish product. The umlaut hanging over that first a added a frisson of Scandinavian freshness and wholesomeness, conjuring up images of pristine fjords, bottomless gorges, and waves crashing against the Baltic coast, never mind the fact that Danes don't use umlauts. It was, in other words, an utterly noncontextual and arguably bonkers marketing maneuver. But it worked. Mattus gained notice. Suddenly people were willing to pay more for the high-butterfat, low-air ice cream. Mattus had three flavors at first: vanilla, chocolate, and coffee. "When I came out with HSagen-Dazs, the quality of ice cream had deteriorated to the point that it was just sweet and cold," Mattus told The New York Times. "Ice cream had become cheaper and cheaper, so I just went the opposite way." A few pseudo-Nordic copycats hit the ice cream scene not long after. Richard Smith created a shell corporation in Sweden and started Frusen GlSdjZ out of a plant in Utica, New York. My mom often walked around the house repeating the tag lines of Frusen GlSdjZ commercials: "If you don't feel guilty, it wasn't that good" and "Who ate all the Frusen GlSdjZ?" (The name means "Frozen Joy" in Swedish.) HSagen-Dazs sued unsuccessfully in 1980 to stop Frusen GlSdjZ from using a Scandinavian-themed ice cream to market their product. HSagen-Dazs accused them of "umlaut infringement," according to The New York Times; the plaintiffs pointed out that both HSagen-Dazs and Frusen GlSdjZ carried an umlaut over the first a's in their names. That ploy didn't work; Frusen GlSdjZ prevailed. But HSagen-Dazs ultimately won our bellies. Who ate all the Frusen GlSdjZ? I guess we all did. After the Frusen GlSdjZ license was sold off, initially to Kraft, and then to Unilever, the brand vanished from the marketplace completely. Ice cream imitators come and go, but true innovators are rare. One of the few entrepreneurs who truly deserves the term innovator and pioneer is Steve Herrell. Herrell's claim to fame: inventor of ice cream with chunks of Heath English Toffee Bar mixed into it. Herrell, like so many who go into the ice cream business, was determined to work for himself. He experimented with adding inclusions to ice cream, like Oreo cookies and Heath Bars, and called them mix-ins. Then came Ben and Jerry. The two schlubby hippies gave me hope that there was more to life than bad synth pop, scrunchies, and Falcon Crest. Suddenly I could eat ice cream with pretzels in it! I woke up one day to find that thirty-one flavors were no longer enough. Excerpted from Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America by Amy Ettinger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.