WEBVTT

NOTE 10. There’s No Such Thing as Homemade Ice Cream

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.480
There is no such thing as homemade ice cream.

2
00:00:05.480 --> 00:00:10.780
In the freezer section of the grocery store, there's vanilla bean, French vanilla and

3
00:00:10.780 --> 00:00:14.560
yet another vanilla flavour called homemade vanilla.

4
00:00:14.560 --> 00:00:21.280
Now come on – I'm in the store here, looking at rows and rows of commercial products produced

5
00:00:21.280 --> 00:00:28.000
by a vast capitalist machinery – a cornucopia of frozen goods made by advanced industrial

6
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.380
technologies made from goods and services that require a global division of labor and

7
00:00:33.380 --> 00:00:38.700
a sophisticated trading and price system rooted in private property and replete with entrepreneurial

8
00:00:38.700 --> 00:00:42.460
risk at every stage of production.

9
00:00:42.460 --> 00:00:48.520
There's nothing homemade about anything here, and surely everyone knows that.

10
00:00:48.520 --> 00:00:54.420
It's just marketing – not that there's anything wrong with that.

11
00:00:54.420 --> 00:00:59.940
And it got me thinking – what is real homemade ice cream?

12
00:00:59.940 --> 00:01:03.220
Oh, I've made it before.

13
00:01:03.220 --> 00:01:08.860
It has always struck me that you can't really make real homemade ice cream with an electric

14
00:01:08.860 --> 00:01:12.400
machine – electricity is so artificial!

15
00:01:12.400 --> 00:01:16.180
And if you were going to plug in a machine, in what sense are you actually making the

16
00:01:16.180 --> 00:01:18.060
stuff?

17
00:01:18.060 --> 00:01:24.020
Pouring ingredients into an electric bucket and waiting isn't really making anything.

18
00:01:24.020 --> 00:01:27.100
You might as well let someone else do that and buy it from them.

19
00:01:27.100 --> 00:01:31.300
You might as well make a trip to the freezer section of the grocery store.

20
00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:32.740
Nope.

21
00:01:32.740 --> 00:01:38.440
Homemade must be hand-cranked all the way, so the elbow muscle does the hard work.

22
00:01:38.440 --> 00:01:42.720
And it can be exhausting – you turn and turn and crank and crank, and it seems like

23
00:01:42.720 --> 00:01:45.340
it will never become thick like ice cream.

24
00:01:45.340 --> 00:01:50.120
Then, when it finally happens and you're tired out, the turning gets harder and harder

25
00:01:50.120 --> 00:02:01.360
Is it worth it?

26
00:02:01.360 --> 00:02:06.600
That's a subjective judgment, but consider – how many of the ingredients themselves

27
00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:08.880
are homemade?

28
00:02:08.880 --> 00:02:13.680
Is the stuff that makes the ice cream really homemade and truly authentic?

29
00:02:13.680 --> 00:02:17.700
We've already dispensed with the need for an electrical plant in your backyard by settling

30
00:02:17.700 --> 00:02:19.880
on the hand-cranked method.

31
00:02:19.880 --> 00:02:24.100
This is a great step towards homemade.

32
00:02:24.100 --> 00:02:27.900
But what about the rock salt – a product that seems useful for either breaking up ice

33
00:02:27.900 --> 00:02:32.360
on the sidewalk or for making ice cream, but not much else?

34
00:02:32.360 --> 00:02:35.060
I bought my packet at the store.

35
00:02:35.060 --> 00:02:40.480
This is clearly a compromise of the seeming need for autarky in ice cream production, so

36
00:02:40.480 --> 00:02:43.480
what if we made this ourselves?

37
00:02:43.480 --> 00:02:49.920
Wikipedia says that rock salt occurs in vast beds of sedimentary evaporite materials that

38
00:02:49.920 --> 00:02:55.320
result from the drying up of enclosed lakes, players and seas.

39
00:02:55.320 --> 00:02:59.140
Salt beds may be hundreds of meters thick and underlie broad areas.

40
00:02:59.140 --> 00:03:03.280
In the United States and Canada, extensive underground beds extend from the Appalachian

41
00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:09.120
Basin of Western New York through parts of Ontario and under much of the Michigan Basin.

42
00:03:09.120 --> 00:03:16.400
The deposits are in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan.

43
00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:21.920
The Kura salt mine is a massive deposit of rock salt near Islamabad, Pakistan.

44
00:03:21.920 --> 00:03:24.140
In the United Kingdom, there are three mines.

45
00:03:24.140 --> 00:03:29.920
The largest of these is at Winsford in Cheshire, producing half a million tons on average in

46
00:03:29.920 --> 00:03:32.380
six months.

47
00:03:32.380 --> 00:03:38.460
All I can say is, yikes, I've got some travelling to do and some crews to hire, and then I have

48
00:03:38.460 --> 00:03:42.460
Then there's the problem of packaging the stuff and shipping it back from Islamabad

49
00:03:42.460 --> 00:03:48.380
or Winsford or wherever – but wait, it seems like Morton sells a product that might be

50
00:03:48.380 --> 00:03:55.080
the same thing, but in any case markets itself as ice cream salt, as distinguished from just

51
00:03:55.080 --> 00:03:58.460
plain rock salt for driveways and the like.

52
00:03:58.460 --> 00:04:02.340
What the difference is, I don't know, but I'm not taking any chances, so more research

53
00:04:02.340 --> 00:04:05.540
on this point is clearly necessary.

54
00:04:05.540 --> 00:04:07.820
Then there's the problem of milk.

55
00:04:07.820 --> 00:04:11.480
I could buy a cow, but that's a lot of upkeep.

56
00:04:11.480 --> 00:04:15.320
I understand that you have to milk one of these things regularly, whether you're making

57
00:04:15.320 --> 00:04:17.700
ice cream or not.

58
00:04:17.700 --> 00:04:21.560
And there's the problem of feed and waste and many other issues.

59
00:04:21.560 --> 00:04:25.680
Raising and keeping this animal healthy might turn into a full-time job, with no time left

60
00:04:25.680 --> 00:04:31.420
over for making – much less enjoying – ice cream.

61
00:04:31.420 --> 00:04:37.360
Of course, you need refrigeration and ice, without which matters are rather hopeless.

62
00:04:37.360 --> 00:04:41.420
It took most all of recorded human history to invent the refrigerator, which only became

63
00:04:41.420 --> 00:04:46.840
common in American homes in the 1920s and 1930s, and so it is pretty presumptuous for

64
00:04:46.840 --> 00:04:50.280
me to assume that I could construct one on my own.

65
00:04:50.280 --> 00:04:55.560
Plus, these things run on electricity, and I thought I had dispensed with that in the

66
00:04:55.560 --> 00:04:58.320
name of AUTHENTICITY.

67
00:04:58.320 --> 00:05:02.200
So long as I'm using electricity to store the milk and ice, why not just let electricity

68
00:05:02.200 --> 00:05:04.000
turn the crank too?

69
00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:09.800
I'm back to Plan A. Get a generator. I'll pretend not to notice the problem of making

70
00:05:09.800 --> 00:05:16.540
homemade gasoline to power it – after all, I could use a river, need to get one of those,

71
00:05:16.540 --> 00:05:22.400
or erect a giant windmill, prepare for dead bird carcasses to litter up the yard, but

72
00:05:22.400 --> 00:05:28.400
then there's no power on windless days. How about a solar-based generator? Break out

73
00:05:28.400 --> 00:05:30.040
Not the Windex.

74
00:05:30.040 --> 00:05:32.560
Can I make that at home, too?

75
00:05:32.560 --> 00:05:34.040
This is getting expensive.

76
00:05:34.040 --> 00:05:38.980
Of course, you need eggs, which means chickens, which I wouldn't entirely rule out, but everyone

77
00:05:38.980 --> 00:05:42.320
I know who has tried to raise chickens for eggs eventually throws in the towel.

78
00:05:42.320 --> 00:05:46.660
It's a disgusting job, full of unexpected headaches like getting rid of varmints and

79
00:05:46.660 --> 00:05:50.920
keeping the chickens warm and buying expensive feeds and dealing with filthy critters and

80
00:05:50.920 --> 00:05:53.260
chicken coops.

81
00:05:53.260 --> 00:05:59.460
It is doable, provided I wanted to quit my job in order to raise a cow and chickens,

82
00:05:59.460 --> 00:06:04.060
but there's still the problem of sugar and flavor.

83
00:06:04.060 --> 00:06:05.700
Sugar can be had in many ways.

84
00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:12.660
I could raise bees or sugar cane, or extract it from fruit, and many other processes, each

85
00:06:12.660 --> 00:06:13.660
rather daunting.

86
00:06:13.660 --> 00:06:16.980
It'd be far easier to just buy some.

87
00:06:16.980 --> 00:06:22.540
But then what about the authenticity and that important homemade aspect of my ice cream?

88
00:06:22.540 --> 00:06:26.740
Now, let's talk about vanilla.

89
00:06:26.740 --> 00:06:32.700
Apparently this derives from a bean grown in Mexico and Madagascar, and, says Wikipedia,

90
00:06:32.700 --> 00:06:38.220
extensive labor required to grow the vanilla seed pods.

91
00:06:38.220 --> 00:06:43.400
Now I seem to have bumped up against an impossible problem – I live in neither place, and apparently

92
00:06:43.400 --> 00:06:48.060
my climate just can't do the vanilla-growing thing.

93
00:06:48.060 --> 00:06:50.900
Maybe I need a greenhouse.

94
00:06:50.900 --> 00:06:54.300
Still, vanilla would require a chemistry lab out back.

95
00:06:54.300 --> 00:06:58.860
I've said nothing about the ice cream maker itself, which uses stainless steel gears and

96
00:06:58.860 --> 00:07:03.060
a crank – in the whole history of humanity, steel as we know it only became economically

97
00:07:03.060 --> 00:07:09.120
viable in the 19th century, and stainless steel is very much a modern invention.

98
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:15.180
It would require vast study for me to even figure out the metallurgical aspects of this,

99
00:07:15.180 --> 00:07:19.700
and at the least I would need a blast furnace out back, and one wonders how the cow, the

100
00:07:19.700 --> 00:07:27.460
Chicken, the electrical plant and vanilla-producing greenhouse would fare amidst all that.

101
00:07:27.460 --> 00:07:31.220
Once I have the steel, I would still need to form it.

102
00:07:31.220 --> 00:07:34.740
Then there's the problem of the wood for the maker, too, so I'd need to cultivate

103
00:07:34.740 --> 00:07:41.360
trees and mill them and somehow shape them into round slats.

104
00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:46.660
Already it would appear that I need a backyard full of stuff from all nations and all times,

105
00:07:46.660 --> 00:07:50.140
Not to mention the physical impossibility of maintaining all these contraptions without

106
00:07:50.140 --> 00:07:55.720
a vast labour force that included engineers from many fields and experts in a huge range

107
00:07:55.720 --> 00:07:57.860
of tasks.

108
00:07:57.860 --> 00:08:02.820
Bankruptcy would begin even before this operation began.

109
00:08:02.820 --> 00:08:10.740
The division of labour – global and involving thousands and even millions of people – is

110
00:08:10.740 --> 00:08:17.600
is looking ever better, all beautifully coordinated by the price system, and given forward motion

111
00:08:17.600 --> 00:08:24.260
by entrepreneurs at every stage, operating in coordination from all parts of the world.

112
00:08:24.260 --> 00:08:31.660
In fact, it is pretty clear that there is no such thing as homemade ice cream, and that

113
00:08:31.660 --> 00:08:37.940
we use the phrase only in the most metaphorical sense – thank goodness.

114
00:08:37.940 --> 00:08:42.220
In this case, I'm seeing the point – the store is just the last stop in a huge and extended

115
00:08:42.220 --> 00:08:47.940
process that emerged over centuries and requires the involvement of people all over the world.

116
00:08:47.940 --> 00:08:52.860
They can call their vanilla ice cream home-made if they want to – given what they go through

117
00:08:52.860 --> 00:08:57.280
to get us good food at good prices, capitalists have more than earned the right to stretch

118
00:08:57.280 --> 00:09:01.880
the language a bit when trying to persuade us to buy their products.

119
00:09:01.880 --> 00:09:08.640
We are the beneficiaries of a remarkable system of human cooperation.