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

0:00There is no such thing as homemade ice cream. In the freezer section of the grocery store, there's vanilla bean, French vanilla and yet another vanilla flavour called homemade vanilla. Now come on – I'm in the store here, looking at rows and rows of commercial products produced by a vast capitalist machinery – a cornucopia of frozen goods made by advanced industrial technologies made from goods and services that require a global division of labor and a sophisticated trading and price system rooted in private property and replete with entrepreneurial risk at every stage of production. There's nothing homemade about anything here, and surely everyone knows that.

0:48It's just marketing – not that there's anything wrong with that. And it got me thinking – what is real homemade ice cream? Oh, I've made it before. It has always struck me that you can't really make real homemade ice cream with an electric machine – electricity is so artificial! And if you were going to plug in a machine, in what sense are you actually making the stuff? Pouring ingredients into an electric bucket and waiting isn't really making anything. You might as well let someone else do that and buy it from them. You might as well make a trip to the freezer section of the grocery store. Nope. Homemade must be hand-cranked all the way, so the elbow muscle does the hard work.

1:38And it can be exhausting – you turn and turn and crank and crank, and it seems like it will never become thick like ice cream. Then, when it finally happens and you're tired out, the turning gets harder and harder Is it worth it? That's a subjective judgment, but consider – how many of the ingredients themselves are homemade? Is the stuff that makes the ice cream really homemade and truly authentic? We've already dispensed with the need for an electrical plant in your backyard by settling on the hand-cranked method. This is a great step towards homemade.

2:24But what about the rock salt – a product that seems useful for either breaking up ice on the sidewalk or for making ice cream, but not much else? I bought my packet at the store. This is clearly a compromise of the seeming need for autarky in ice cream production, so what if we made this ourselves? Wikipedia says that rock salt occurs in vast beds of sedimentary evaporite materials that result from the drying up of enclosed lakes, players and seas. Salt beds may be hundreds of meters thick and underlie broad areas. In the United States and Canada, extensive underground beds extend from the Appalachian Basin of Western New York through parts of Ontario and under much of the Michigan Basin.

3:09The deposits are in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. The Kura salt mine is a massive deposit of rock salt near Islamabad, Pakistan. In the United Kingdom, there are three mines. The largest of these is at Winsford in Cheshire, producing half a million tons on average in six months. All I can say is, yikes, I've got some travelling to do and some crews to hire, and then I have Then there's the problem of packaging the stuff and shipping it back from Islamabad or Winsford or wherever – but wait, it seems like Morton sells a product that might be the same thing, but in any case markets itself as ice cream salt, as distinguished from just plain rock salt for driveways and the like.

3:58What the difference is, I don't know, but I'm not taking any chances, so more research on this point is clearly necessary. Then there's the problem of milk. I could buy a cow, but that's a lot of upkeep. I understand that you have to milk one of these things regularly, whether you're making ice cream or not. And there's the problem of feed and waste and many other issues. Raising and keeping this animal healthy might turn into a full-time job, with no time left over for making – much less enjoying – ice cream. Of course, you need refrigeration and ice, without which matters are rather hopeless. It took most all of recorded human history to invent the refrigerator, which only became common in American homes in the 1920s and 1930s, and so it is pretty presumptuous for me to assume that I could construct one on my own.

4:50Plus, these things run on electricity, and I thought I had dispensed with that in the name of AUTHENTICITY. So long as I'm using electricity to store the milk and ice, why not just let electricity turn the crank too? I'm back to Plan A. Get a generator. I'll pretend not to notice the problem of making homemade gasoline to power it – after all, I could use a river, need to get one of those, or erect a giant windmill, prepare for dead bird carcasses to litter up the yard, but then there's no power on windless days. How about a solar-based generator? Break out Not the Windex. Can I make that at home, too? This is getting expensive. Of course, you need eggs, which means chickens, which I wouldn't entirely rule out, but everyone I know who has tried to raise chickens for eggs eventually throws in the towel.

5:42It's a disgusting job, full of unexpected headaches like getting rid of varmints and keeping the chickens warm and buying expensive feeds and dealing with filthy critters and chicken coops. It is doable, provided I wanted to quit my job in order to raise a cow and chickens, but there's still the problem of sugar and flavor. Sugar can be had in many ways. I could raise bees or sugar cane, or extract it from fruit, and many other processes, each rather daunting. It'd be far easier to just buy some. But then what about the authenticity and that important homemade aspect of my ice cream? Now, let's talk about vanilla. Apparently this derives from a bean grown in Mexico and Madagascar, and, says Wikipedia, extensive labor required to grow the vanilla seed pods.

6:38Now I seem to have bumped up against an impossible problem – I live in neither place, and apparently my climate just can't do the vanilla-growing thing. Maybe I need a greenhouse. Still, vanilla would require a chemistry lab out back. I've said nothing about the ice cream maker itself, which uses stainless steel gears and a crank – in the whole history of humanity, steel as we know it only became economically viable in the 19th century, and stainless steel is very much a modern invention. It would require vast study for me to even figure out the metallurgical aspects of this, and at the least I would need a blast furnace out back, and one wonders how the cow, the Chicken, the electrical plant and vanilla-producing greenhouse would fare amidst all that.

7:27Once I have the steel, I would still need to form it. Then there's the problem of the wood for the maker, too, so I'd need to cultivate trees and mill them and somehow shape them into round slats. Already it would appear that I need a backyard full of stuff from all nations and all times, Not to mention the physical impossibility of maintaining all these contraptions without a vast labour force that included engineers from many fields and experts in a huge range of tasks. Bankruptcy would begin even before this operation began. The division of labour – global and involving thousands and even millions of people – is is looking ever better, all beautifully coordinated by the price system, and given forward motion by entrepreneurs at every stage, operating in coordination from all parts of the world.

8:24In fact, it is pretty clear that there is no such thing as homemade ice cream, and that we use the phrase only in the most metaphorical sense – thank goodness. In this case, I'm seeing the point – the store is just the last stop in a huge and extended process that emerged over centuries and requires the involvement of people all over the world. They can call their vanilla ice cream home-made if they want to – given what they go through to get us good food at good prices, capitalists have more than earned the right to stretch the language a bit when trying to persuade us to buy their products. We are the beneficiaries of a remarkable system of human cooperation.