Ice Cream

A couple of days ago, I was at the grocery store and I bought a tub of ice cream. I love ice cream, but I rarely buy it. By rarely, I mean maybe once a year. This is because I don’t want to weigh 400 pounds, which I seriously might hit if I allowed myself to eat as much ice cream as I’d like to eat.

When I was a kid, one could buy a pasteboard box of ice cream that held a full gallon of the icy goodness. Four quarts. Eight pints. Sixteen cups. I don’t know when that changed, but it did change. In my neck of the woods, one can no longer buy a gallon of ice cream. Today, it is sold in pasteboard tubs containing three quarts. Six pints. Twelve cups.

I admit that ice cream is a hopeless weakness of mine and I usually avoid it the way an ex-addict avoids heroin, and perhaps that biases my observations. But I contend that the new tubs contain four – not twelve – servings of ice cream. In fact, I further contend that those four servings are “girly” servings which equate to only two “manly” servings of ice cream. Oh sure, the container may say “12 servings” on its side, but that’s just marketing hype. If you’re an ice cream addict, you know full well that you’re lucky if a tub of ice cream lasts two days. In fact, it requires a great deal of willpower to make a tub stretch that long.

I bought the 3 quart tub of Cookies ‘n Cream on Sunday and threw the empty tub into the kitchen trash receptacle on Monday. Sayonara, two-serving tub. I foresee the day (which doubtless is fast approaching) when the largest container of ice cream you can buy is a single-serving tub. Sure, it may say “Family Size” on the tub, but we’ll all know that’s a lie.