When you see a Mister Softee truck on the street, do you stop in your tracks and consider indulging in a creamy treat? Does your mouth water? Do you find yourself standing there debating with yourself? After all, It is just one… I’m sure many of you are even making pro-con charts in your head, but I doubt any of you are thinking about the number of coliforms in your ice cream.
After Glee ends every Thursday at 10pm, Fox News comes on. After last week’s episode, I didn’t immediately turn my TV off after the show, because I happened to be intrigued by a report on ice cream trucks’ cleanliness, as an avid fan of Mister Softee’s vanilla ice cream on a cone (with chocolate crunchies, of course).
When it comes to Mister Softee, I definitely do not stand alone in the Hewitt Halls. “Mister Softee is my main ice cream man. He is always there if you need him. He never disappoints,” says Maya Citron ’13.
“Shame, Shame, Shame” is a segment by Arnold Diaz who exposes wrongdoing and incompetence. He is the winner of 36 Emmy awards for his consumer investigative reporting and is my favorite reporter on Fox (not that I am familiar with many others).
For this particular exposé, Diaz took samples from 20 ice cream trucks, including Mister Softee, YoGo, and several independent operators. These samples were tested in a lab for bacteria called coliforms. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) has declared the normal count of coliforms per gram in a serving of ice cream to be between 10-20.
Only 5 out of the 20 trucks were within the standard, and thus passed the test. Eight trucks contained over 1,000 CFU (coliform forming units) per gram. The highest was a YoGo truck in Union Square, which had over 320,000 CFU per gram of ice cream. One of the cleanest trucks was Big Gay Ice Cream on 16th street and Union Square West, with less than 1 CFU per gram. When asked how these numbers made her feel, Zoe Himmel ’14 responded, “That’s really nasty… This makes me not want to eat ice cream from trucks ever again.”
The source of these outrageously high numbers is the unsanitary practices of the truck operator, which include no gloves or hand-washing, and, very often, the use of one dirty rag to clean all the machines.
Arnold Diaz interrogated the truck operators by showing them the lab results. One man pretended he didn’t speak English to escape his embarrassment. Another man, instead of looking at the lab results, insisted that they retest the ice cream and attempted to shove a spoonful into Diaz’s face. One truck simply drove away.
“I definitely don’t want to be eating from ice cream trucks anymore because knowing this information about what I would be consuming is very disturbing,” says Amanda Rovitz ’15.
It is important to consider that the New York City Health Department inspects trucks for cleanliness, however, it doesn’t test the product. We always need to be conscientious of what we put into our bodies for our health and wellbeing, especially as growing women.