22 Fun Facts About Ice Cream

Most Americans love ice cream and frozen yogurt. Ice cream or some other frozen desert is eaten on a regular basis by more than 90% of people in the United States. If you like ice cream but do not know that much about it, here are some fun facts about your favorite frozen treat. So, rip off the lids to your ice cream containers and enjoy some fun ice cream and frozen yogurt trivia:

1. July is National Ice Cream month but the month that sees the most ice cream production is June.
2. After the churning process, ice cream has at least 50% more air than before hand. The air content of gelato, by contrast, is between 25 to 30%.
3. Ice cream takes up about 9% of the milk produced in the United States.
4. Ice cream used to be served to immigrants when they arrived at Ellis Island. They were
5. George Washington was America’s first president and the first president to eat ice cream. He enjoyed the desert on June 13, 1789.
6. Americans eat more ice cream than any other nation on earth. New Zealand is number 2.The amount of ice cream eaten by the average American is 45.8 pints. That is 26 liters.
7. Globally, people eat enough ice cream each year to fill 5,000 olympic sized swimming pools. That equals 3.3 billion gallons or 15 billion liters.
8. NASA reports that the top three things astronauts miss on space missions are ice cream, pizza and carbonated beverages.
9. Two states have laws on the size of ice cream containers and their corresponding lids. Those states are Hawaii and Wisconsin.
10. In 1672, there was the first English language reference to ice cream.
11. Elvis Presley’s last meal included four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate chip cookies.
12. The most popular flavor for ice cream is vanilla. Nearly 28% told this to the International Ice Cream Association.
13. Because vanilla ice cream was more difficult to make than other flavors, it was not widely available until the 1900s.
14. Chocolate ice cream was invented before vanilla ice cream was invented. Its first written recipe was printed inandnbsp;The Modern Steward.andnbsp;This was in 1692, in Italy.
15. Some ice cream flavors that were popular back in the day such as vanilla, chocolate and coffee remain popular. Some ice cream flavors that were popular then are no longer available, These include asparagus, parmesan and oyster.
16. In the 1890s the ice cream sundae was invented. Soda shops were criticized for selling ice cream sodas that were “sinfully rich” on Sundays. They started serving ice cream without soda and called their treats, “sundaes.”
17. The biggest ice cream sundae weighed more than 24 tons, it was made in Edmonton, Canada in 1988.
18. The waffel cone was invented for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. Abe Doumar suggested an ice cream vendor serve the desert on rolled up waffles when they ran out of plates.
19. Haagen-Dazs may sound European but it was developed by two Americans who thought up the name to make it sound exotic and Danish. That language does not use the umlat.
20. Ben and Jerry only started making ice cream because the bagel making equipment they looked at was too expensive.
21. Ben and Jerry’s started the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream flavor. They premiered it in 1991. They got the idea from an anonymous suggestion left on their bulletin board in Vermont.
22. Pie a la mode was developed at the Cambridge Hotel in New York. Professor Charles Watson Townshend often ordered apple pie with ice cream. A fellow diner, Berry Hall, gave the dish the name.

Ice cream was such a special treat back in the day because it was hard to keep things cold. Now, we can walk into any ice cream store and walk out with containers of the treat with lids to eat later. Before refrigerators were common in homes, people ate their ice cream at the place where it was made. Making ice cream that could be packaged in containers with lids and be served later on was a real development. This lead to both people buying ice cream but also paved the way for the frozen dinners we have today.

As popular as Ice cream is, its exact beginnings are not known. We can all agree, its invention was good for everyone.