The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem

 You know what is hard to define? Vanilla ice cream. 

I mean, first of all, there's vanilla. What does that exactly mean? The organic compound vanillin? The seeds of the vanilla bean, which you can scrape off the plant and use to flavor various foods and flavor bases? a chemical compound created in a lab that resembles the flavor of the vanilla bean closely enough that most people can't tell the difference? 

And then take ice. Are there actual ice crystals in vanilla ice cream? How are they created? If ice is frozen water, does a frozen dairy liquid even qualify? does the word "ice" even have any meaning in this context? 

And cream. Is there any cream in the vanilla ice cream in your freezer? I mean, come on. Have you even read the label? how uninformed are you? Are there any dairy products at all in your ice cream? If you walk into a Dairy Queen and order a cone, did you know that you are technically not ordering ice cream but a soft serve product*?  

If you ask for ice cream in Siem Reap, even if you say the words in Khmer, will it mean anything to them? will they hand you something that resembles what you want?

And yet.... and yet.... if you walk into any ice cream parlor in the US, if you ask in any grocery store, if you order at any restaurant, and say you want vanilla ice cream, they will know what you are talking about.  We may have had an interesting pseudo-academic conversation here today, we may have dissected the idea of vanilla ice cream and "proved" that it does not exist except as a cultural construct in the United States, and yet every single one of us reading here** knows what I mean if I say I want vanilla ice cream.

Dial it back, people. Dial it back. 

* to be fair, I only know this because I googled while doing three minutes of research for this post. 

** I mean, probably. I've never seen any evidence that I have any international readers.