From Prohibition comfort to wartime morale booster, ice cream has played a surprisingly significant role in the country’s history
Flavored ices and frozen desserts have been coveted for thousands of years, across many cultures, by people who have gone to great lengths to procure them. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to climb mountains to harvest ice they’d mix with wine or honey to make sorbet, a word that comes from the Arabic sharba and sharbat, a drink made by mixing snow with various spices and flower blossoms.
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 Edy, 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 was pretty much unheard of.
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.
Corporate America also contributed.
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.
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.
So by the time World War II came around, ice cream had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. Once again the rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts .
“Somebody listening in may have heard us talking about politics or sport, or anything else,” recalls British WWII veteran Harold Goulding, who spent more than three years in Japanese POW camps, “but I think really those were just symbols and we were really talking about food all the time.”
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