One summer when I was a kid, my family traveled to Long Island, where I saw something profoundly upsetting: an ice cream truck with garish, royal blue icicles painted above the words TASTEE TREET. It looked absolutely nothing like the ice cream trucks in my childhood neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The frozen novelties listed on its side were odd and unfamiliar. Its soft-serve cones and sundaes swirled out in strange, misshapen silhouettes. Clearly, something was very, very wrong.  In New York City, only Mister Softee played its insipid music-box jingle everywhere. Its trucks were identical – with the iconic, grinning conehead painted on one side and a lurid strawberry sundae on the other. Little children crave consistency; Mister Softee delivered. The soft-serve ice cream – with its blend of sweetness, air and chemicals, topped with candyish sprinkles or dips – was always the same. Mister Softee was ice cream to me. Simple. Affordable. Comforting. That there could be another brand violated my entire four-year old Weltanschauung (such as it was).  But, oh, had I been born a few decades later, I probably would’ve been apoplectic. Yes, Mister Softee is still parked on corners today, but its jingle has been occasionally muted by noise complaints. (Apparently, not everyone is as enamored of the famous ice cream tune as myself; a few New Yorkers claimed it was literally driving them crazy and threatened to sue.) And alternative ice cream trucks have popped up everywhere, challenging Mister Softee’s primacy.  The Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream truck sells organic ice cream in such flavors as ginger, hazelnut and Earl Grey tea. Why, there’s even vegan ice cream – sold without irony or even a sly name like “Icymoronic”. The Coolhaus truck, previously seen making star appearances at the farmer’s market in New York’s Union Square – boasting “Architecturally Inspired Gourmet Ice Cream” – has been known to offer such flavors as “Beer and Pretzels,” “Cuban Cigar” and “Fried Chicken and Waffles.”  Itizy Ice Cream has sent a pale, mint green vehicle out into the world that looks like an ice cream truck as conceived of by Martha Stewart. And Big Gay Ice Cream? So popular that it’s opening a shop in Los Angeles this summer.  I love ice cream – all kinds of ice cream: cheap, fancy, lo-fat, hi-fat. Mass-produced, artisanal. I am an equal opportunity ice cream eater. I do not discriminate. I take no, ahem, truck with all these local, homemade, hipster ice cream companies gaining a toehold in my hometown. I have gladly tasted their products repeatedly.  But I am profoundly attached to Mister Softee ice cream trucks as an institution. It’s more than simple nostalgia. The arrival of the ice cream man used to be a communal event that united an entire neighborhood. As soon as you heard that jingle, children who’d been hitting each other in the playground raced together toward the curb in a shared state of gleeful hysteria. The sole issue – the group conversation – was simple: chocolate or vanilla?  Now, the Bauhaus-inspired ice cream trucks offering pricey, made-to-order sandwiches, themselves inspired by roadhouses and gourmet magazines, strike me as yet just another way that our culture is continuing to splinter and stratify – culturally and economically.  Yet the worst offender is not an artisanal truck at all. Recently, Master Softee trucks have begun appearing on the streets of New York. At first glance, they look like Mister Softee. They even offer similar treats. But Master Softee has a mascot with a darker shade of pointy waffle cone. Coupled with the name “Master,” this brings a whole new level of ickiness and racism to the ice cream truck world.  Not to mention trademark infringement. Unsurprisingly, Mister Softee is suing Master Softee. Just this past week, US District Judge Laura Taylor Swain granted an injunction against Master Softee. Filed, perhaps, under the heading of “you can’t make this stuff up”, she ruled that “An anthropomorphized waffle cone character with a blue jacket and red bow tie" featured on the competitor’s trucks could confuse ice cream buyers.  And so someone, finally, seems willing to defend the integrity of the beloved ice cream trucks of my childhood. In a world of rarified flavors and injustice, this, at least, is sweet.
Susan Jane Gilman: Artisanal, Early Grey-flavored sorbet is all well and good, but a culture without a familiar waffle-cone face on wheels – and an annoying jingle – is a stratified culture indeed