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There comes a point in just about every child’s life when they encounter a force far greater than themselves and gain some valuable perspective on how big and scary the world really is. After years of parents letting them win in board games and races, everyone eventually comes up against an ornery older cousin, or a stubborn grandfather or a family friend who doesn’t bother with the act.
For me, the most notable such moment came when my family traveled to Vermont to visit some family friends and went to an ice cream stand with a reputation for large servings. Their signature item was a massive serving of maple soft serve topped with every syrup, nut and candy you can imagine, plus what must have been an entire can of whipped cream. As the world’s greatest ice cream eater, I proudly ordered it and a few moments later, sat down to tuck into what would surely be no match for my truly singular speed and capacity. As I took my first bite, mostly of whipped cream and sprinkles, one of our friends sat down across from me, not with the kiddie cup I was used to my parents sitting down with, but the exact same thing as me.
“Looks like a race,” someone remarked, looking over at us sitting across the table from one another. “I bet Evan will finish first. He’s quite the ice-cream eater.”
“I don’t think so.” I’ll never forget the seriousness of her voice as she said it. There was no humor in her eyes as she spoke the first words of my life spoken to me the way an adult speaks to another adult, rather than how an adult speaks to a child. The worst part was that it was true. I barely finished three quarters of the trough of ice cream, and had hardly made it past the whipped cream by the time she was licking the bowl clean. My memory of the stomach ache I had afterwards is a little foggier—I’m assuming it’s more or less the same as how women forget the pain of childbirth so not as to be deterred from having more kids—but I suspect it was not a pleasant hour or two.
It must not have been that terrible, because while I accepted that day that I wasn’t the best ice-cream eater the world had ever known, I’ve got to be in the top five or so. I ate ice cream almost every day of my life growing up, nearly cried when we switched the order of our meal and dessert to have “ice cream for dinner” on a few occasions and increased my ice cream eating rate to daily at the request of a nutritionist who declared me slightly underweight at age 12. When I became a tour guide at Lawrence I had to alter the cliche of knowing Lawrence was the school for me the moment I stepped foot on campus because that wasn’t exactly the case. I knew Lawrence was the school for me the second I walked into Andrew Commons on my audition day, because as I sat down for breakfast at 9 a.m., I noticed they had the soft-serve machine running. I have a camera roll overflowing with photos of my creations and have rarely felt so validated as when I’ve walked from the ice cream machine to my seat and heard whispers and other comments around me about my creation. “Look at the size of that cone!” “What a perfect spiral!” My personal favorite is when the comment doesn’t include any specific information about the ice cream itself, but is timed such that I know it’s about me. “Jesus Christ!” they exclaim as I walk by, the scent of chocolate vanilla twist swirling through the air in my wake.
But it turns out that ice cream is pretty expensive, so when I moved off the meal plan this school year, I started making sacrifices. I’ve always loved Breyers ice cream the best, and look for local, high-quality ice cream makers whenever I can at the grocery store, but when Aldi sells a half gallon for $1.99 it’s hardly something to think twice about.
I also didn’t think twice when I started getting stomach aches every night, and to be honest, I had good reason not to. It was the beginning of a new term and a transitional period for me: I was eating new food from a different part of the country and working long, stressful days at school. It’s also worth noting that, while I don’t have time to wax poetic about my love for chocolate and cookies and Dr. Pepper, there was a lot of noise in the data as I analyzed what was causing me such debilitating pain around the same time each night.
Eventually there was a night when we had run out of all my snacks except ice cream, and after a few bites it was a pretty instant response. The stomach ache I was getting was distinct, and there it was. My heart broke. I looked at the ingredient list, expecting the cheap stuff to be made with a massive list of chemicals, but there were only a few ingredients.
Skim milk, ok, cream, sure, sugar, duh, chocolate flavored flakes, you can see those, corn syrup, fine, whey, okay, natural flavor, that’s the mint, locust bean gum, ew bugs but fine, guar gum, that’s in everything, carrageenan.
Carrageenan?
I took to the internet. Wikipedia tells me that “Carrageenans are a family of natural linear sulfated polysaccharides that are extracted from red edible seaweeds. Carrageenans are widely used in the food industry, for their gelling, thickening and stabilizing properties.” That makes sense, and seaweed seems like a fairly common ingredient in various foods. I dug deeper. One paper tells me, “Carrageenan is extensively used as an inflammatory and adjuvant agent in vitro and in animal experimental models for the investigation of immune processes or to assess the activity of anti-inflammatory drugs […] Clinical evidence suggests that CGN is involved in the pathogenesis and clinical management of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD); indeed, food-exclusion diets can be an effective therapy for disease remission.” This stuff is administered to animals in order to study inflammation and is linked to symptoms of IBS in humans? Well, I could have told you that, but it only gets worse from here. Another scientific paper reads, “Although the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 1982 identified sufficient evidence for the carcinogenicity of degraded carrageenan in animals to regard it as posing a carcinogenic risk to humans, carrageenan is still used widely as a thickener, stabilizer and texturizer in a variety of processed foods prevalent in the Western diet.” Degraded carrageenan is carcinogenic? Can it degrade when exposed to your stomach acids?
There is a tremendous body of work on this subject, and to be fair, the FDA and WHO deem food-grade carrageenan safe for consumption. Some cultures even use it as a remedy for colds. There are people far smarter than me and more knowledgeable on the subject who should be listened to rather than me, and there’s certainly no cause for hysteria over this topic. Maybe I’m just allergic or something. But as I’ve started paying attention to the ingredient list, I’ve started noticing that that particular stomach pain seems to coincide with eating ice cream with that ingredient in it, and once again, I’m met with a force far greater than myself interfering with one of the most beloved parts of my life. It was one thing as a child to be met with this feeling, but another entirely for it to happen again so early in my so-called adulthood. It turns out I don’t know anything, and it’s pretty hard to figure stuff out for sure. But as long as I double-check the ingredients, my bliss is restored and, once again, I can proudly wear the crown of the world’s greatest ice-cream eater. Or, at least, second greatest. I’ll take what I can get.