There's a great sequence in Bill Forsyth's "comfort and joy" where somebody records their ice cream van jingle on a kids toy xylophone and plays it through a handheld PA. Just the right degree of mind-numbing repetitiveness and decibel ear busting noise.

It's fictionalised from very real British experiences with ice cream and fish and chips, working class communities, Italian family business, crime. And of course deep fried ice cream. I worked in an Italian migrants coffee bar/greasy spoon as a dish pig in 1970s edinburgh, the local chip shop and ice cream scene was almost entirely Italian, in some parts of Scotland going back to the end of the 19th century.

For some people the "99" from a van with a squirt of raspberry sauce is a key childhood memory, a lift from the darkness of intergenerational mass unemployment, and rainy day holidays on stoney beaches.

Gelato is posh. Mr Whippy is what poor people ate.

For anyone not from Britain, majority of parents, taken in by advertising, feed kids highly processed ice cream sold at low prices, no different to most other countries.

Ingredients are terrible for all the brands mentioned. And British children have high obesity rates and dental issues.

The golden age was pre-big food when ice cream was made naturally.

The celebration of targeted product design, branding and advertising is something we should move away from. The companies don’t care about its customer’s health, just its profits.

"Today’s essay by Ruby Tandoh..."

I'll take any excuse to recommend Ruby's essay on British Cheese, "How a cheese goes extinct: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-a...

> When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history. [...]

What a fantastic read into the history. I work with many food scientists and constantly track what's up with chocolate / ice-cream industry these days.

There's always a struggle between companies choosing profits (by adopting cheaper, more processed ingredients) and consumers wanting tasty but healthy foods. In UK things are improving because of regulations, but everywhere else things are not that good, and it's not just ice creams.

It started with cream, to end up with additives