Dippin' Dots

I'd like to think of myself not as a pessimist, but a realist. Most of the times I've heard an advertorial claim, I see what's really behind it. "This knife will stay sharp forever." Yeah, sharp enough that some poor garbage man forty years from now is gonna lose a finger. It cut a penny in half, for God's sakes. What do they expect it to do to a trash bag? "This is the last mop you'll ever buy," they say. I hear that and I know why it'll be the last mop. I know that that mop is going to kill me somehow. Maybe it's been soaked in poison, noxious fumes wafting up from my floor. Maybe it'll splinter into my hand, sending little nanobot splinters that know just what veins will take them to my brain. I may not know specifically what those snickering slogans have in mind, but I get what they are implying.

So when I tried Dippin' Dots for the first time, I knew. "Dippin' Dots: The Ice Cream of the Future." A bleak future, indeed. If this product is any indication, the world will be so cold that ice cream will come in tiny, ice-hard pellets. These beebees exist at minus 40 degrees. They froze to my tongue like a winter flagpole, burning in their coldness. Here, I thought that we were headed towards a hot future, greenhouse effect and all. But, those scientists must have really messed things up. We're going to overshoot a heatwave and go directly to a new ice age. And, as I explained this to the vendor, something clicked. The spittle hitting his fear-frozen face from my pronouncement of the word "bastards" drew my eyes downward. His polo shirt clenched in my now white knuckles was a spotless sky blue. But, these pellets of ice cream were colorful-mint chip and rainbow flavors. Was this the beginning of his shift? "No," he said between the tears.

How, then, had he kept his shirt so clean in the dirty world of ice cream sales? Scratch that. How had he kept his ice cream scoop so clean? There wasn't a speck on it. The revelation hit me so hard I had to step back. This ice cream was made specifically for ease and cleanliness in serving. This vendor was just a middleman, some snot-nosed teenager. The waterpark he was working for, just like the airports and movie theaters that all sell Dippin' Dots, was just trying to save time wasted on cleaning serving utensils. They don't care if the bitter cold kills customer taste buds. "The Ice Cream of the Future" was a statement of intent rather than fact.

The corporation behind Dippin' Dots wanted to rule the world of ice cream sales by providing ease to tourist attractions' owners. Ready-made stands or vending machines could place Dippin' Dots at strategic locations around the world. The mimicking ability of Dippin' Dots is ominous — perhaps after killing one's taste buds, they reprogram new ones to detect normal ice cream flavor. They will never, though, attain the deliciousness of real ice cream, which experts know reaches its purest state at exactly the melting point. Consumers might be lulled by easy spooning, a complete turnaround from the wooden stick gouging at ice cream cups of more innocent times. But they must understand that this is simply a novelty, an ice cream novelty. No one seems to remember that another ice cream novelty, push pops, were released the same year as army scientists and the FDA created fluoride?

Oh, but Dippin' Dots won't stop with duping consumers. No. Wouldn't it be even easier to keep Dippin' Dots at their negative 40 degree temperature if the entire world were made that cold through some kind of Doomsday device? The logic had come full circle, but with a haunting, additional question. At such cold temperatures, how could the world sustain the resources to produce ice cream? While running through the park screaming the answer, I blacked out. Maybe it was from my bumbling attempt at self-medication. Or, maybe it was that someone didn't want me to get out my message. Dippin' Dots is made of people! It's made of people!

— Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)