Hey, there's de-icer in my ice cream!

Every once in awhile I make a connection between two disparate areas of interest. The other day it was ice cream and airports. My wife has been bringing home tubs of a certain brand of ice cream (yay!) that I enjoy. But then I actually read the ingredients, and I was surprised to see "propylene glycol" listed. I'm no chemist, but my obsession with airports (see Airline Terminal Mania) allowed me to recognize this as a key ingredient in aircraft deicing fluid. And that can't be good. (The brand is Edy's, by the way.)

So I checked around and yes, propylene glycol is considered safe to ingest, and is often added to processed foods to help them retain moisture. Fine, but that's not enough to reassure me. I can't help but think of the "high fructose corn syrup" factor in this. That chemical, which replaced sugar as a sweetener in most processed foods in the U.S. around 1980, is considered safe, too, but I'm convinced it has long-term effects that we just aren't aware of. I've tried to eliminate it from my diet, but that's not always easy in the land of overprocessed foods. Still, it's been a long time since I've thoughtlessly swigged soda sweetened with HFCS.

One interesting thing about high fructose corn syrup is that it was developed by the Japanese, which made me want to write an international conspiracy thriller where high fructose corn syrup was exposed as a plot by the Japanese to get even with the U.S. for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stay tuned on that one.

Back to ice cream: So yesterday, the grocery fairy caused a tub of another brand of ice cream to materialize in the freezer—this one marketed on its packaging as "all natural." That can mean anything, but I looked, and sure enough, there was no propylene glycol listed in the ingredients. And you know what? It kinda tasted better and felt more "right" going down.

How much of that is just psychological I'm not prepared to say. But it's me and all my hang-ups and emotions and non-scientific judgments that are in charge of what I actually eat, and that's good enough for me to steer clear of deicer in my ice cream from now on.

Except maybe in winter.