The New York Times reports on the latest battle being waged by moms. This time it's against the ice cream man. What used to be a happy childhood experience has turned into a nightmare for many parents. New ice cream trucks lurk around parks, luring kids in. It drives moms crazy. The minute that music starts up, the kids start whining for ice cream that's not even real ice cream. Instead, many brands are filled with chemicals and high fructose corn syrup. And the ice cream trucks don't leave after the line dissipates. They sit there in a running truck, belching exhaust for hours and hours. When truck drivers were arrested for selling drugs in the trucks, it didn't help their case.
It got so bad in Chicago's 18th Ward, where many working-class African-American families live, that parents got the ice cream trucks banned because of unsanitary practices and drug sales. So, is there any upside to the ice cream truck tradition? There is in some cities.
Parents in most places improvise solutions — running the other way when they hear the jingle or telling their children that they left their wallets at home.
Rachael Reiley of Cambridge, Mass., called the ice cream truck "the music truck," convincing her 3-year-old son that it was playing "The Entertainer" simply to entertain. But he soon got wise when he saw the other children walking away from the truck, their faces smeared with chocolate and vanilla, their hands filled with ice cream cones.
Ms. Reiley didn't mind buying him a treat, occasionally. But the truck -- called Here's Frosty -- parks outside her door on most sunny days around 4:30 p.m. and wakes her son from his nap. "Then he's up, plastered against the window, yelling: 'Music truck! Music truck!'" Ms. Reiley said. "Sometimes he grabs his little bank and says, 'I have money.'"
As a new mother, she said, people coach you on potty training and what to feed your child. "But the ice cream truck, nobody ever mentions that," she said.
We haven't seen an ice cream truck in years; we had no idea they had become such a nuisance to mothers. It used to seem like such an old-fashioned, harmless thing. But if parents went so far as to actually get them banned in parts of Chicago, it must have been a real nightmare.
It puts a whole new spin on that commercial for Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing where the music plays and the kids come running to get delicious salads instead of ice cream. It's like a fantasy for moms who hate the ice cream man.
