Some Busybodies Want to Ban Ice Cream Now

Posted by Enrique on 08.21.2009

Menace to society



I'm not blessed with children myself, but I've noticed that producing offspring can have the unfortunate side effect of turning perfectly sensible adults into raving lunatics. Case in point – this slice-of-life story that appeared earlier this week in the New York Times, which describes the horror some parents face when confronted by vendors of frozen treats:

Vicki Sell, mother of 3-year-old Katherine, tenses when the vendor starts ringing his little bell, over and over, hoping her daughter doesn't have the typical Pavlovian response.

Ever since Katherine had an inconsolable meltdown about not being able to have a treat, Ms. Sell has been trying to have unlicensed vendors ousted from the park. She has repeatedly called the city's 311 complaint hot line, joining parents nationwide who can't stand the icy man or his motorized big brother, the ice cream man.

"I fall into the camp of parents who are irate," Ms. Sell said. She has equal disdain for Mister Softee and the ice cream pop vendor outside the park, but since they are licensed, there is not much she can do about them.

According to the story, there are quite a few parents who harbor this irrational disdain for ice cream vendors. Some are irritated by the jingle (and who can blame them?), but the core complaints seem to be the treats aren't very healthy, and some vendors engage in predatory business practices:

"When we were kids you would either get the ice cream or not and then he would just go away," [one mother] said. "But they just sit there now, and it's like an hour of ‘Can I have ice cream? Can I have ice cream?' It's really the vulturelike behavior that bothers me."

I would guess this "vulturelike behavior" would disappear if parents simply stopped buying ice cream for their whining tots. The ice cream man won't hang around if there's no market for him, and it's not really his fault if you're a coward who can't say no to your kid. I vaguely recall one time when I was about kindergarten age the Good Humor truck came through my neighborhood while I was playing with some friends. Naturally, we rushed up to the truck and began ordering – we were too young to understand the concept of money, we assumed the treats would be handed over without question or compensation. But we would not have any treats that day, because our mothers, who were standing nearby, just said no. It didn't appear to create a crisis of conscience for my mother, and I don't remember the Good Humor man driving through our neighborhood much after that.

Compare that to Ms. Sell's desire to ban ice cream vendors from her local park. Thank goodness she can't intrude on the livelihood of licensed vendors, although I must admit the idea of a licensed ice cream vendor seems peculiar to me. I suspect in New York you need a license to give someone the finger. But if Ms. Sell were to try and convince her city councilperson to ban ice cream vendors altogether, she might have some success. The NYT article notes that the 18th Ward of Chicago did exactly that last year.

Hopefully, the busybody mothers in the NYT story are outliers who are only featured because some writer needed to fill space during a slow news month. I would hate to think we live in a world where parents believe it's the government's job to prevent them from having to deny their children ice cream.