{"id":3385,"date":"2013-04-17T20:43:46","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T01:43:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3385"},"modified":"2013-04-17T20:47:14","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T01:47:14","slug":"the-zen-of-quality-ice-cream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3385","title":{"rendered":"The Zen of Ice Cream Quality?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a reflection on the evolution of ice cream<\/a> into “frozen dairy desserts” in today’s New York Times Dining and Wine section. The “De Gustibus” column writer, Dan Barry, had a case-in-point with Breyers Ice Cream. In Mr. Barry’s younger days (which were also my younger days), Breyers was what a middle-class family bought for special occasions. It was real ice cream with lots of butterfat. Today, Breyers mostly offers concoctions of milk, corn syrup, whey, carrageenan and various vegetable gums; real ice cream is left to the high-cost snobs and “artisanal” producers such as Haagen Dazs, Ben and Jerrys, and Glace. Allegedly, the masses want cold stuff that is very sweet and very smooth, more so than the rich stickiness of high-fat ice cream. <\/p>\n

And so “frozen dairy desserts” is mostly what they get, most of the time. As in the days when Breyers was real, most people still like to splurge now and then, and thus may stop at Cold Stone or pick up a quart of Turkey Hill premium. But more and more freezer space in the supermarkets is taken up by those “frozen desserts” (including some Turkey Hill offerings). <\/p>\n

Mr. Barry regrets this trend. To be honest, though, I don’t. Sure, the big food producers are making a ton of money mixing up cheap ingredients (including thin air! modern quasi-ice creams are whipped to contain a lot of tiny bubbles) and selling them at a nice premium as to quench the public’s desire for something sweet, cold and smooth. But if people like it . . . well, what can one say? The market is big enough to still make room for real ice cream, along with variations that cut down on fat, sugar, and dairy contents (for veg-heads like myself; I rather enjoy Rice Dreams, Soy Delicious and Soy Good). Ice cream is definitely NOT undergoing a “market failure”; most local supermarkets devote a least one full 60 foot aisle to refrigerated dessert products. <\/p>\n

Mr. Barry did make a comment in his article, however, that brought back another interesting memory from my younger days. In several of my past blog entries, I discussed author Robert Pirsig<\/a> and his “thinking man’s best seller”, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/strong>. ZAMM was first published 39 years ago, in April 1974. One of the key themes which Mr. Pirsig focused his contorted life story around was the idea of “quality”. During his time as a college teacher, he set himself out to ponder the nature of “big-Q” quality. He spent a long evening and most of the night staring at the window, wondering what Quality — and life — meant. Love, truth, goodness, quality — lovely butterflies that you can see but can’t catch, admire but can’t control. <\/p>\n

Later on, Pirsig tried to formalize his Quality ponderings into a systemic written examination of philosophical concerns, via a “Method of Quality<\/a>” or MOQ. But he never caught the imagination of the public, nor of the academicians. It seemed as though he had betrayed the spirit of his reflections in ZAMM, thinking that he really could catch and utilize the elusive notion of quality to understand himself and the world. Zen itself sort-of teaches that words can’t capture these things. But Pirsig and ZAMM were never really about Zen.<\/p>\n

So, I found the following sentence in Mr. Barry’s article somewhat ironic. Mr. Barry, in contending that the world is going downhill and the rise of frozen dairy desserts is just another sign of the coming of the devil, noted how Breyers has engaged in Orwellian double-speak. It has replaced the motto once found on its packaging, “all natural”, with Mr. Pirsig’s beloved word, i.e. “quality”. You’d think that Mr. Barry would be offended by the mis-use of Robert Pirsig’s sacred word. However, instead of bewailing the irony of using “quality” to describe the cheapening and debasement of the once-pure world of ice cream, Mr. Barry said that quality “is one of those impressive words that loses impact the more you think about it.”<\/p>\n

Hmmm . . . quite the opposite of what Mr. Pirsig felt about “quality”. Robert Pirsig believed that quality was an apt metaphor and a summary of all that is (or once was) right in the world. Dan Barry appears to feel that it’s ultimately just as hollow as the stuff that corporate America tries to sell with it (including those airy frozen desserts). Yea, a lot has changed in the four decades since Robert Pirsig took that motorcycle journey across the heartland. Pirsig turned out to be mostly a “one hit wonder”, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is being forgotten. If Mr. Barry is right, ZAMM will not be remembered 100 years from now, and it probably won’t be showing up on any professor’s “great books curriculum”. <\/p>\n

So, does the word “quality” really lack quality? Or has it just been so exploited by capitalist or political forces (including the owners of Breyers) that it has become hollow for us, despite the fact that ultimately there is or at least was some real significance to it? Is it thus not unlike like main-line religion? And democracy? Humankind finds words and concepts for the sacred, then wears them out. It’s great that it helps to give the common Joe and Jane the choice of hundreds of types of affordable frozen desserts. But how can and will we express and share our search for the holy, for true meaning in life, if anything and everything we say is craftily twisted to sell a product or make a politician king? (Or should we just “go Zen” and just stop talking about it all together?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a reflection on the evolution of ice cream into “frozen dairy desserts” in today’s New York Times Dining and Wine section. The “De Gustibus” column writer, Dan Barry, had a case-in-point with Breyers Ice Cream. In Mr. Barry’s younger days (which were also my younger days), Breyers was what a middle-class family bought for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,23,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3385"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3385"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3387,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3385\/revisions\/3387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}