Ben & Jerry’s ice cream came into my life around the same time I first learned about the ’60s, and for a long time, the two remained linked in my mind.
To be clear: This was a sanitized version of the ’60s appropriate for a seventh grader. Woodstock, not Altamont. The 1963 March on Washington, not the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I wanted to march in protests and sing folk songs and educate my elders about righteous causes, but these were the Reagan-Bush years when we triumphed over the Evil Empire and reached the end of history and there was nothing left to protest in America.
But at least my parents took me to Ben & Jerry’s, where there was a mural on the wall of bucolic green hills and Holstein cows under bright blue skies (which was, for some reason, how I imagined Woodstock), the scoopers wore tie dyed t-shirts, and you could contribute to worthy causes by the simple act of eating ice cream named after notable people in the ’60s. Ben & Jerry’s represented that decade’s dream of peace and love and benign capitalism. They even protested the 1991 Gulf War (albeit through an ad in the New York Times, not a demonstration with singing).
Of course it couldn’t last. In 2000, the same year as the first election I ever wanted to protest, Ben & Jerry’s sold out to Unilever. The dream was over. And then other exciting forms of ice cream started to appear, like Jeni’s, Ample Hills, and Salt & Straw, all of which made the current overloaded incarnation of Ben & Jerry’s seem like it was trying way too hard.
But when I started reading Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book, originally published in 1987, it took me back to that innocent time. And since it was a week of terrible heat and political turmoil, I was happy to go there.
The story of Ben & Jerry’s is the sort of Boomer fairy tale that made the angry Gen X-ers behind the Baffler hate Boomers.
As they write in their cookbook, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield met in the early ’60s in Long Island, New York where they were the two widest kids in the seventh grade and the only ones incapable of running a seven-minute mile. When their teacher told them they would have to try again, Ben refused, arguing that if he couldn’t do it the first time, it was foolish to expect success on the second try. Jerry was impressed with his audacity. This incident set the tone for their friendship: Ben had the crazy ideas and Jerry followed and smoothed things over.
They became business partners in the fall of 1977. Ben had dropped out of college and was failing to make a living as a potter. Jerry had graduated from Oberlin College, where he had learned a few useful carnival tricks, and had been rejected by 40 medical schools. “So we decided to change our courses and head there together,” Ben writes in the introduction to the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book, where he tells their origin story. “We weren’t interested in making a lot of money; we just wanted to do something that would be fun.”
The two thought it would be fun to settle in a college town and sell a food that they liked. They narrowed their choices to bagels and ice cream, Ben’s two favorite foods at the time, but the ice cream equipment was cheaper. With $12,000 in seed money, they rented a dilapidated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, and started an ice cream business.
The first thing they did, before they even learned how to make ice cream, was befriend the townies by selling hot drinks and giving away freshly baked oatmeal cookies to anyone who could tell them a funny joke. Next, they signed up for a Penn State correspondence course in ice cream-making that cost them $2.50 apiece. Jerry, it turned out, was better at the technical aspects, thanks to all his pre-med chemistry courses. Ben was the official taster although, due to a sinus condition, his sense of taste was impaired.
“When we began,” he told the New York Times in 1994, “the game was for Jerry to make a flavor I could taste with my eyes closed. To do that, he had to make ice creams that were intensely flavored. Also: because of this disability, I have an excellent sense of mouth feel. Creaminess and crunchiness are very important to people who can’t taste.” Hence Ben & Jerry’s habit of putting large chunks of cookies and candy in their ice cream, most successfully the Heath bar (they turned the bars into chunks by dropping the boxes off a ladder; eventually, they would become Heath’s biggest customer).
Ben & Jerry’s officially began selling ice cream in May 1978. At first, it was a small-town operation with an inconsistent menu, poor service, and mismatched furniture. Word spread around Burlington and eventually the whole state of Vermont, and the pair began selling ice cream to restaurants and supermarkets. The business grew and grew, apparently without too much effort (at least in Ben’s telling): Within the first month of wholesale sales, they had 200 clients. They built a plant. They expanded to 23 employees who made 100 gallons of ice cream every day.
And then, in 1984, Häagen-Dazs tried to block their expansion into Boston by telling their distributors not to carry Ben & Jerry’s. Ben and Jerry knew they lacked the resources to fight a prolonged legal battle. So they retaliated by organizing a ’60s-style “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign, a reference to Pillsbury, Häagen-Dazs’s parent company. There were bumper stickers, signs, a banner flying from a plane over a New England Patriots game, and even a one-man protest (Jerry) in front of the Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis.
Ben & Jerry’s emerged triumphant — and famous, with distribution and, eventually, their Scoop Shops throughout the United States. Calvin Trillin, who chronicled their battle with Häagen-Dazs in the New Yorker, described Ben as an exemplar of “the hippie entrepreneur — one of the people who carried the style of the sixties into consumer businesses aimed at their contemporaries, and whose response to success is to express not gratitude for living in a land of opportunity but astonishment at a world so weird that people like themselves are considered responsible businessmen.”
Ben and Jerry continued to refuse to act like responsible businessmen. They channeled 7.5 percent of their pretax profits to their charitable foundation and 5 percent to employees. To ensure equality, they mandated that no one, including themselves, could earn more than five times the salary of the lowest-paid employer. When they needed money to build a plant, they started selling shares — to Vermont residents only. They worked with like-minded partners. They created a special flavor to benefit the Amazon rainforest. They were the butt of jokes about political correctness, but they didn’t care.
“We think making a better world increases profits,” Jerry explained to the New York Times. “If you have a world where there are a lot of riots and disparities, that’s not a world where you can sell a lot of ice cream. If you have a world where people are nurtured and their basic human needs are met, you can sell more.”
Of course it couldn’t last: By the late ’90s, stock prices were half what they had been a decade earlier. Ben & Jerry’s faced the choice of jettisoning its social mission or selling out. Unilever, which bought the company for $326 million, promised to continue with the good causes. But both Ben and Jerry eventually left the company and Ben & Jerry’s was never quite the same after that. Or maybe the world wasn’t the same. The 2000 election happened. 9/11 happened. The economic realities of life became such that a couple of directionless hippies could not start an ice cream company with a dream and a $4,000 bank loan (around $19,000 today) and retire 16 years later as zillionaires. Hell, it was hard enough just paying rent on an apartment. Ice cream was, like everything else, a Very Serious Business. It could be enjoyable and refreshing, but it was not fun.
Having long given up on both Ben & Jerry’s and the ’60s, I was wary of the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book, which made making ice cream seem like a lark. Had making ice cream at home ever been easy, even in the ’90s? It was certainly a pain in the ass now. My partner had bought an ice cream maker a few years ago, but we got bored of the whole thing after we realized it could take literally days to make a pint of ice cream. Cook the custard. Chill it overnight. Do some other stuff. Churn the mixture. Hurrah! Ice cream! Now wait three hours till it hardens in the freezer. It was so much easier to walk the three blocks to our neighborhood shoppy shop with its freezer full of Jeni’s.
I am not ashamed to admit that my favorite thing about the Ben & Jerry’s book is that even if you follow the recipe scrupulously, it’s possible to have a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, my all-time favorite flavor, in 20 minutes. (And it has real Heath bars! Ten years ago, Ben & Jerry’s got rid of the Heath bar in the name of supporting non-GMO ingredients and now uses some horrible generic toffee bar that tastes like cardboard, as if we couldn’t tell the difference.) This is because they don’t make you cook the custard and then re-chill it overnight; if you have issues with using raw eggs, you can leave them out and sacrifice a little creaminess. Making chocolate takes a little longer because you have to melt the bars of unsweetened chocolate before you mix it with the other ingredients, and then you have to chill the whole thing again, but the wait is only an hour or two. Ben and Jerry maintain that ice cream tastes best right out of the ice cream maker, when it’s still a little soft, and I’m inclined to agree.
For a week, I made ice cream nearly every day. I made vanilla. I made chocolate. I made chocolate mint. I made mocha. I mixed in Oreos. I mixed in Heath bars. The ice cream maker, previously neglected on a dusty shelf, became my favorite kitchen appliance. Not every batch was perfect. Chocolate chips froze too hard. The melted chocolate didn’t quite meld with the milk and cream and manifested as tiny flakes instead. It didn’t matter. As Jerry wrote in the chapter on ice cream science, “There’s no such thing as an unredeemingly bad batch of homemade ice cream.”
The book was written before dairy-free ice cream had become a thing, so it’s no good for people with lactose issues. It also lacks the flavors of the modern ice cream canon, like salted caramel and goat cheese and birthday cake. It’s funny to me to think about how Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough was once so cutting-edge, Ben and Jerry had to plead with their readers to just try it.
While I was eating my homemade ice cream, Unilever announced that it was preparing to sell off its ice cream holdings (which also include Magnum and Cornetto), valued at nearly $20 billion, and lay off 7,500 employees. It’s unclear what will happen next.
Which seems to be the state of everything in these allegedly unprecedented times. In 15 years, will some Gen Alphas be selling ice cream that tries to pass off the 2020s as a colorful, inspiring decade when people really gave a damn? Will anyone ever believe again that anything about the business of food is uncomplicated fun? I can’t imagine it, but the marketing of history is funny. Maybe no one in the middle of the unprecedented times of 1968 could have imagined Cherry Garcia ice cream, either.
Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.
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