LEAVE MY ICE-CREAM ALONE!

My daughter, for all intents and purposes, sent me a news link to a story about ice-cream recall in China.  The headline reads: “Chinese city reports coronavirus found on ice cream”

What does this mean?!!!!

The moment I opened the message and saw the headline, my heart sank.  I instantly went into ice-cream panic. 

As an ice-cream lover – no… that is too mild a description for my relationship with ice-cream – not just any ice-cream, but GOOD ice-cream (I won’t say the brand here)….  So let’s do this again…. As an Ice-cream FANATIC, I felt victimized and tortured by the headline.  How could it be that the virus has found its way onto the one thing that I still have to myself?  It is not like I can go to the movies the way I used to….

Den nutten can really go so?

As I am writing this I am now getting it – the way the extroverts must feel about being forced to stay in… could this be the universe’ way of putting into perspective the turmoil of the extrovert?  Is this where I now say that “I identify”…..But I digress (as I often do). 

I know that the headline is specific to China, but let us be completely rational here.  When we first heard about the virus, it was specific to China and most people did not necessarily see it entering into the global space, but it did.  So right away my brain started connecting all the dots…every single invisible one, and the questions/thoughts/concerns started flooding my mind:

• How safe is the ice-cream that I am consuming?
• If a server is a “carrier”, what are the possibilities of transferring the virus to the icecream?
• How long does the virus last on the icecream?
• How easy is it to be transferred to the ice-cream?
• Is my favourite ice-cream brand/shop following the protocols to ensure that what has ice-cream-occurred in China doesn’t happen here?

What’s an ice-cream lover to now do?  HELP!!

For me, indulging in ice-cream is not just about the taste of it.  It is usually an unwinding experience.  Ice-cream eating is something that I look forward to.  It is a part of my me-time – my leisure!  As much as my love affair with it is so intense, I do not consume it very often.  In fact, I eat ice-cream once every 6 weeks, for the most part.  After all, one has to make efforts to exercise self-control, for VERY obvious reasons.   So understand that, for me, the matter of continued access to ice-cream during the pandemic is important, so this news headline registers as a big LOSS!

Those who know, KNOW. 

On a good ice-cream-indulging-day, I would look forward to going to my favourite spot and ordering any of my favourite flavours and sitting, mostly by myself (or sometimes with one of the 3 other persons with whom I shared this ice-cream commonality) and strategically licking all sides of my sky high cone, in complete silence, until it was all done.  However, Since the pandemic, I have had to sit in my car on location.  This didn’t matter to me; I experienced the very same effect. Licking my ice-cream and taking in my surroundings brings me peace, and I was happy to still be able to do this despite what was happening.

With this new report, however, things have automatically changed for me.  I had an ice-cream date with myself and had to postpone having read the headlines. 

What an ice-cream conundrum! 

One could argue that if we look at life this way, we would not consume anything store bought. The difference is that almost everything else can be washed with vinegar, heated or cooked. The way I see it, the ice-cream gods need to arrange for me to have a consultation with a food biologist/expert, etc. to provide reassuring details about how to proceed, before I venture into my ice-cream eating adventures again.

In the meantime, COVID-19 needs to just chill (on second thought… no chilling, since ice-cream requires that).  How about the virus just disappears completely and LEAVE MY ICE-CREAM ALONE!