The spring pandemic shutdown had a double-edged effect on the market for food. In most categories, consumption went up, around Europe and North America. But one product, ice cream, has suffered. In many places, it has continued to suffer even after the easing of restrictions. Why?

Ice cream’s predicament is even more striking when you compare it with what else was happening in people’s kitchens. Home confinement expanded time at people’s disposal. Many remembered a long-held desire to learn how to bake properly, including their own bread, and Instagram and Facebook were flooded with photos of their achievements. Home-made ice cream has featured much less.

The pandemic first struck in cold weather. Perhaps that explains everything. Not quite. Certainly, ice cream parlours were hit badly – but then they always do poorly in the winter months. Ice cream sales in supermarkets remained the same, however; indeed, they rose marginally.

Why were the kind of people experimenting with bread making not also giving ice cream a go? Why have ice cream parlours in many countries experienced difficulty even after the weather began to warm up?

It turns out that ice cream is a special food. It’s particularly hard hit because ice cream is where four of our cultural nerves meet: fake news, sourcing, social distancing and optimism.

Given the initial association of COVID-19 with cold weather, early fake news advised against eating ice cream. That lie was more prevalent in places like India than Europe, but it was prevalent enough that the World Health Organisation felt it had to set the record straight.

The production of ‘super premium’ ice cream has also been affected by problems with sourcing. If you’re going to boast of using Madagascar vanilla, or West African cocoa, then the spread of the pandemic in Africa is going to raise prices.

And ice cream is a very price-sensitive product. Even large companies face a stiff challenge from supermarket own-brands, with profits made on volumes sold.

But ice cream has been most hard hit when it’s the type sold by specialist parlours. Social distancing rules are difficult to meet for ice cream.

Soft serve will not survive home delivery. Most ice cream wouldn’t if the trip takes longer than 20 minutes. Even if it did, our ice cream preferences would wreak chaos on establishments taking orders.

Ice cream combinations exceed those of pizza by far. With just three flavours on offer, you have six different options. Beyond that, it’s dizzying. And how do you deal with hot fudge? Or caramel?

Simplification doesn’t help much. If an establishment decides that it will only deliver in tubs, most would need to invest in (expensive) family-sized containers.

But the major problem is another. Ice cream is unlike pizza in another key respect. Take-home pizza is a genuine pleasure. Pizza in front of the TV, the mozzarella stretching as you hold a slice in hand, in good company... arguably tastes better than it does at the pizzeria, even if the cardboard box imparted some of its flavour.

Ice cream is unlike any other food in its symbolism

The ice cream experience is different. Buying an ice cream begins with the desire that precedes it. It could be the hot chase after the tinkling van, so that by the time the cone is in your hands, anything tastes good, even one thin on butterfat and big on air.

If you’re in a gelateria, then the experience begins with staring longingly at all the flavours – never the same as reading them off the menu. It’s about looking at the expert assemblage of the ice cream in the cone, with the nuts and the fudge, and the years of experience you bring to the delicate operation of eating it slowly but deliberately, licking it into shape, so that not a drop is wasted.

Ice cream is unlike any other food in its symbolism. If you eat any other food while walking in the street, it means you’re in an unseemly hurry. Ice cream, however, was made to be eaten on promenades. To eat an ice cream while walking is the very symbol of leisure.

All this experience is severely curtailed by the social distancing rules. Ice cream queues are not new. But the queues we’re used to are those where we all press against the display glass, craning necks for sneak peeks. Now, with many parlours, only one set of clients is permitted at any one time, and they have to rush, since others are waiting behind them.

That kills the spontaneity of “Let’s have an ice cream”. It gives some people enough time for second thoughts about their waistline, and a rationale for parents struggling with insistent children.

Above all, it strangles the spirt of ice cream. “I’ll eat this before the sun melts it.” “I’ll eat this and won’t get fat.” Ice cream is optimism: a taste of a smooth, soothing world, tailored to our personal tastes.

Its chew – stretchiness – is like a lingering kiss that never disappoints. Even the most sophisticated artisanal ice cream brings back fuzzy memories of childhood. When, before the pine-cone ice cream served at the latest fashionable ice cream, had you tasted pine cones – if not the time when you surreptitiously licked one before your father’s back?

It’s this experience – of spontaneity, nostalgia, adventure – that has had a stake driven through its heart by the pandemic. By killing off optimism, and introducing a wariness towards anything around us, COVID-19 has changed our relationship to ice cream.

No wonder it took two enterprising Italians in Milan to come up with a rejoinder: a special COVID gelato called, La Cura. Sales, as they say, have gone viral.

ranierfsadni@europe.com