Ice Cream Redemption

Late last summer, I had a bone to pick with a nearby ice cream company. An actual bone. From a mammal. Of some kind.

I had been relaxing with a bowlful of ‘Mason’s’ Rocky Road Light ice cream when I bit into the bone. No one in my family was present to witness the grody moment and for a split second, I considered simply continuing on with my eating enjoyment. Really. In that instant, I thought, “It’s OK, I can overlook this disgusting occurrence—I’ll just remove the BONE from my MOUTH, get up, deposit it in the kitchen trash bin, walk back to my seat and resume eating, calm as can be. No one ever need know about this.” The next moment I thought: “Grace!?! What is WRONG with you??? You just bit into a BONE in your ICE CREAM!!!”

I spooned what was left of my ice cream from the bowl back into the carton. I placed the bone on top. I duct-taped the carton shut and wrote, “Do not open—found bone in here,” on my make-shift seal. I called Mason’s headquarters the next morning. I said, in my most courteous telephone voice: “Hello. My name is Grace Waters, I live in A-Town, and I bit into a bone in a bowl of your Rocky Road Light ice cream yesterday.” The operator directed my call to Customer Complaints. The Customer Complaints representative said, essentially, “That is unlikely. Our Rocky Road Light ice cream does not contain bones. But we’ll send you an envelope in the mail so you can send your supposed bone specimen back to our laboratories for examination.”

Two minutes after that call ended, I reconsidered. I thought perhaps Mason’s should not be trusted to investigate its own product contamination problem. I called the County Health Department and asked, “What should I do if I bit into a bone in my ice cream?” The Health Department woman replied, matter-of-factly (as if fielding this kind of question every day): “Call the State Department of Agriculture and Markets. They’ll investigate for you.”

Sure enough, they did. A state employee came to my house, sat in my living room and interviewed me for about a half-hour regarding the bone-in-ice-cream incident. He snapped a few photographs of the ice cream in question, with the bone on top, sparkling with ice crystals. The paperwork completed, he procured a small suitcase-sized chest of dry ice, all billowy-smoky-chemically-freezing-cold, and packed away my Ratty Rocky Road for its trip to the lab.

In the next few weeks, we received 2 letters:

The first, from Mason’s Ice Cream, was a letter of apology for the inconvenience caused by this incident, along with three coupons for free Mason’s Ice Cream. I refused to redeem the coupons because, a) I possessed no appetite for ice cream of any kind, least of all Mason’s; and, b) I suspected that redemption of the coupons might render us ineligible for the million-dollar settlement we might expect from Mason’s in the months to come.

The second letter came from the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. It said, in sum: We examined your ice cream. It had a bone in it.

Last week, I gave up my waiting. I surmised that no more would come of the ice cream trauma. Metaphorically, the bone was dry. I redeemed the ice cream coupons. I partook and I enjoyed—Panda Paws Light, bone-free.

Dem Bones