Ice Cream Won't Apologise: Pleasure Is the Point

There is a particular cruelty in asking ice cream to justify itself.

I have been thinking about this since I read, with something between amusement and genuine irritation, the latest round of wellness-industry hand-wringing about whether ice cream has a future — whether GLP-1 drugs and clean-eating movements and the relentless moralization of appetite will finally do what no summer heat wave ever could: kill the thing dead. The argument goes that if people stop feeling guilty about food, they stop craving the guilty pleasures. That Ozempic is, among other things, an aesthetic position.

Which is, of course, precisely the wrong way to think about it.

My father kept a specific container of *glace à la vanille* in the freezer in Lyon — from a *glacier* on Rue de la République whose name I will not give you because it is mine — and he ate it not as compensation for virtue or surrender to vice but as a daily act of considered pleasure. He was a man who thought carefully about everything he put in his mouth, not because he feared it, but because he respected it. The ice cream was not a lapse. It was a statement. *I am alive, I have a body, and this is what a body is for.*

The wellness industry has spent twenty years trying to make us forget that sentence.

What strikes me about the current panic — sales softening in certain markets, manufacturers suddenly very interested in "better for you" reformulations, think pieces appearing like clockwork — is how completely it misreads the psychology of eating. Ice cream was never really about sugar. It was about the suspension of time. The cone eaten on a seawall. The bowl scraped at the kitchen table at midnight when sleep wouldn't come. The particular democracy of the *granita* cart in a Maltese summer, the one that exists equally for the child and the seventy-year-old fisherman and the tourist who has just discovered that *bajtra* — the prickly pear — is not a flavour they have a word for in their language, but that their body understood immediately.

You cannot medicate away the desire to stop time.

What you can do, and what I suspect will happen regardless of what the GLP-1 evangelists predict, is change the conversation around ice cream in a way that is actually more honest. The mass-market stuff — the industrial, high-HFCS, artificially stabilized product that lines supermarket freezers — that was already a pale approximation of the real thing. If the wellness moment accelerates its decline, I cannot summon much grief. But the *gelateria* where someone spent three years perfecting the texture of a pistachio from Bronte? The *pastizzeria* in Valletta that makes a *ġelat tal-karbu* — carob ice cream — that tastes like the island itself, bitter and sweet and ancient? That will survive because it was never competing on the same terms.

It exists only for pleasure, the Guardian piece says, as if that were an accusation rather than a credential. *Only for pleasure.* As if pleasure were the smallest category. As if every human civilization that has ever learned to freeze sweetened cream or fruit water and share it in the heat of summer was engaged in something trivial.

Noma served a reindeer moss ice cream that I ate in Copenhagen in the depths of February, and I remember it more precisely than I remember most meals that cost three times what I paid that night. It was cold and faintly bitter and tasted of something I had no name for — earth, maybe, or the space between earth and air — and it made me completely still for about four seconds. Four seconds of absolute presence. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, almost everything.

The history of ice cream is the history of desire made technically possible. The Romans sent slaves to pack snow from the Apennines into the cellars of their villas. The Arab traders who occupied Sicily — and through Sicily, Malta — brought the sherbet tradition that became *sorbetto* that became the granita that my mother ate every August of her childhood in Sliema, standing at the kiosk near the front, the syrup running down her wrist. When the Normans came and the Aragonese came and the Knights of St John came, they brought their own sweetnesses and their own cold-making techniques, and the island absorbed all of them the way it absorbs everything: quietly, completely, without making a fuss about the transformation.