At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman Read Free Book Online Page A

volumes), called
Everybody’s Lamb
, has become Hardly Anybody’s Lamb. If I could make him Everybody’s again, in my own whiffling century, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, or shell peas.

I CE C REAM
    read last March that the town council of Stafford, New Jersey, had passed an ordinance stating: “At no time shall a vendor be permitted to use a sound device, mechanical bell, mechanical music, mechanical noise, speakers, [or] amplifiers.” The target was ice cream trucks, whose peripatetictootles the council wished to classify with the roar of jets and the blast of car alarms. As a child in suburban Connecticut, I had always considered the purl of the Good Humor truck to be more closely akin to a cricket’s chirp or the sound of summer rain: a seasonal gift, wreathed in sweet associations. I was therefore heartened to read, in May, that Jeffery Cabaniss, the owner of Jef-FreezeTreats, had successfully challenged the constitutionality of Stafford’s anti-tootle law in federal court. Mr. Cabaniss’s only concession was to change his truck’s melody from “Turkey in the Straw,” which had particularly vexed the residents of Stafford, to the less familiar, and thus presumably less irksome, “Music Box Dancer.”
    The New York Times
called Mr. Cabaniss a “First Amendment hero.”I didn’t give a fig about the Constitution. I cared about the contents of Mr. Cabaniss’s truck. As far as I was concerned, a vote against Jef-Freeze Treats was a vote against ice cream, and a vote against ice cream—even against Klondike Krunch Bars and Power Ranger Pops, which constitute the heart of the Cabaniss inventory—was a vote against the pursuit of happiness.
    I recently calculated (assumingan average consumption of one pint of ice cream per week, at 1,000 calories per pint, and the American Medical Association’s reckoning of 3,500 calories per pound of stored body fat) that had I eaten no ice cream since the age of eighteen, I would currently weigh −416 pounds. I might be lighter than air, but I would be miserable. Before I was married, I frequently took a pint of Häagen-DazsChocolate Chocolate Chip to bed, with four layers of paper towels wrapped around the container to prevent digital hypothermia. (The Nutrition Facts on the side of the carton define a “serving size” as a quarter of a pint, but that’s like calling a serving size of Pringles a single potato chip.) Now, under the watchful eye of a husband so virtuous that he actually prefers low-fat frozen yogurt, Igo through the motions of scooping a modest hemisphere of ice cream into a small bowl, but we both know that during the course of the evening I will simply shuttle to and from the freezer until the entirety of the pint has been transferred from carton to bowl to me. A major incentive for writing this essay was that during its composition this process was not called greed; it was called research.

    My favorite flavors are all variations on chocolate, vanilla, coffee, and nuts, none of which is good for you. I do not like fruit flavors. They are insufficiently redolent of sin. Strawberry ripple is the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie such nouvelle atrocities, recently praised in
The New York Times
, as tofu-anise, cardamom, white pepper, and corn ice creams.
Corn?
Why notBrussels sprouts? (I shouldn’t say that too loudly, lest the Ohio State University Department of Dairy Technology, which has created sauerkraut sherbet and potatoes-and-bacon ice cream, derive inspiration for a new recipe.) On the other hand, ice cream shouldn’t actually kill you. When I called the Häagen-Dazs Consumer Relations Department a few days ago to verify the butterfat content of Mint Chip,I was alarmed to hear the following after-hours message: “If you have a medical emergency with one of our products that requires immediate attention, please call Poison Control at 612-347-2101.” What medical