National Ice Cream Month

I’m getting ready for National Ice Cream Month, which is July. Whatever your politics, however disaffected and anti-everything you may feel, hope is present in a cone, a cup, or under a mountain of whipped cream and hot fudge sauce, cherry on top.

I try to eat ice cream every day. I have shared this interesting fact with many people and, so far, no one has ever said, “Me too.” I don’t dwell on the feeling of loneliness this creates. I have my family to fall back on. My brothers are probably good for a dish of ice cream most days. My children were raised to be vigorous ice cream eaters. This time of year, no one in the family is likely to drive past a roadside dairy bar with a giant soft-serve cone or plastic cow in the parking lot, as long as a respectable hour or two has passed since breakfast.

Then there is this hopeful news, which someone stumbled across and sent to me in the last couple of weeks: an article by public health historian David Merritt Johns in The Atlantic back in April 2023, reporting on a 2018 Harvard graduate student study connecting a half-cup of ice cream per day to a lower risk of heart disease among diabetics. The experts leered, of course. The data was scrubbed. The result was the same.

“This was obviously not what a budding nutrition expert or his super-credentialed committee members were hoping to discover,” Johns reported, quoting his source, who said, “He and his committee had done, like, every type of analysis—they had thrown every possible test at this find-ing to try to make it go away. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.”

Works for me. I am not presently diagnosed as a diabetic. Consult your doctor, all ye diabetics. But maybe check out the April 13, 2023, issue of The Atlantic online.

The science is very good for New England, which, you know, consumes an average of almost twenty-three quarts of ice cream per person every year, compared with a national average of fifteen quarts. It’s a solid number . . . if you’re happy as a piker. A quart of ice cream around our house makes it a week. On day four, someone will usually notice a shrinking supply and say something. Day five, bright-colored Post-it notes go up on the fridge door. Day six, there better be a quart backer in the freezer by close of business. That puts me at around 240 percent above the national average—which will explain my feeling of loneliness. It’s lonely at the top.

In 2025, according to the website Dairy Herd Management, Vermont had more ice cream shops per 100,000 residents than any other state in the Union. New Hampshire was ninth, with more than fifteen shops per 100,000. Rhode Island was the only other New England state in the top ten, rank-ing third. It falls to another nutritionist graduate to understand why three itty-bitty New England states have a giant “Nutty Buddy” enthusiasm for ice cream. I’m just glad I live here.

That said, I don’t gravitate to New England ice cream flavors such as Moose Tracks, Pumpkin, Campfire S’mores, or even Maple Walnut. I grew up in an age when milk was delivered and left in a box on the doorstep, the only telephone was mounted on the kitchen wall, and we put chains on our tires in winter. It was a less complicated time. I like maple walnut, except too often the walnuts are soggy and soft. My go-to is simply chocolate chip. If I can see the container and the ice cream has the right faint yellow color, with evidence of tiny seeds, I will buy the banana ice cream. Technically, my favorite. But honestly, no banana ice cream has ever matched what we could get as children at Avondale in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.

Speaking of which, is there anyone anymore choosing to mount a bicycle and pedal home while eating a medium-sized ice cream cone? I suspect it’s a lost art. Even bike riding has become such serious business today. I’m anti that.