Cicada Ice Cream

I’d gladly take things that go bump in the night over things that go chirp in my stomach.

When Sparky’s in Columbia, MO created cicada ice cream it became an instant legend, not just for being the most gastronomically grotesque creation of the year, but also for batting a thousand. Only one batch was made and it sold out in just thirty minutes. The store pulled the flavor before it made a second batch because the health department did not give its endorsement; apparently the most hygienic cicada preparation has not been fully researched.

In all seriousness, more spooky than brown sugar and bug ice cream is that anything “not specifically provided for in the local health code” is understood to be illegal. Bureaucratic red flagging in food regulation is the same battle being fought by Nice Cream in Chicago. I’m certainly no authority on the subject, but I worry for the future of small businesses.

(Thanks to Laurie for the tip.)

Cubism or Zombie?

Picasso believed in two things: ice cream and zombies.

In all seriousness, I once went to an ice cream shop in D.C. (which shall remain nameless) that had a huge mural of Guernica, only each of the characters doomed to die in the horrible bombing were holding ice cream cones. Appalled, I remarked to my brother how completely and utterly tasteless the mural was. Loudly, I might add, which probably explains the pay-and-get-out attitude of the proprietor. Whoops.

Hey, the word "zombie" reminds of something! A creative writing curriculum I wrote for elementary schoolers called "Brains! or, Writing with Zombies" was recently published. Money from the sales go into the programs at 826, free after-school tutoring and creative writing centers in several US cities.


Note from 2012: Read some of the amazing and hilarious zombie stories written by my young students as published in 826CHI Compendium Vol. 3!