A Skeptic Tries: Dairy Queen’s Dipped Cone
A Skeptic Tries is a series that examines our food resistance and what happens if we try anyway. Associate editor Ali Francis reluctantly joins Dairy Queen next.
A few months ago my boyfriend and I bought a literally twenties 2011 Subaru Forester from a burly Russian in upstate New York in an attempt to combat the existential disorientation of working life from my mustard couch in Brooklyn. stuffed it full of CamelBaks, ambitious yoga mats, trail mix and a first aid kit and drove south.
The days were long. My friend queued up various business podcasts discussing the merits of investment apps while I stared comatose out of the window for hours. My body was heavy, but my mind raced: over variants; Inferno climate; cultural and civil decay; what life would be like if we all had to live on Mars; when, if ever, would I make it home to see my Australian parents; if, if at all, I would achieve the dreams I had shoved under the rug of corporate stability. That’s the thing about road trips, as popular as they are: If you’re alone with your brain hole for hours and have an endless stretch of trilling asphalt, there’s plenty of time to turn.
Every few hours we stopped to buy food and fuel (tip: don’t buy a ten year old SUV unless you love paying for gas). As an Australian, I wanted to try America off the beaten track, unlike my friend who spent miles discussing the merits of one large fried chicken sandwich over another. Every time we stopped, our ways parted respectfully, he returned with Coke and dipped in scarce fries with glee devotion while I meticulously Google Maps for family-run burrito restaurants, dimly-lit restaurants with red sauce, and chic farm-to-eat. Salad buffet at the table. Most of the time, overwhelmed by the choice – or lack of it – I devoured a sad mix of the above nuts and seeds.
On a two-week layover in Dallas to visit my friend’s parents, I was surprised by a group decision to stop for chocolate-dipped cones after dinner at Dairy Queen. The excitement spread like a party wave, but it ended with me. “You have never tried DQ ?!” said my friend’s stepmother.
I shook my head – no, never.
“Oh, you will love it!” said his father.
Doubtful, I thought. I knew enough about fast food places to believe I was facing a long list of creepy ingredients that would lead to disappointment and tooth decay. Places like DQ were the physical manifestations of everything I thought was wrong with the American food system: predatory marketing campaigns, industrialization, and everything highly processed.
But I didn’t want to be that girl in front of my friend’s parents; the “I don’t eat that stuff” girl. So I agreed to try the dipped cone.
After breaking its seal, the chocolate condensed in the humid air and began to pour out softly like a broken dike.
DQ was founded in Joliet, Illinois in 1940 and today serves an estimated 750,000 submerged cones per week. Despite its unmistakable popularity as an American soft-serve icon, the place I went to in Dallas, Texas – thanks to falling profit margins – is one of the state’s most valued losers. Cone in hand, I sat at a rubber-like table under one of the store’s distinctive red umbrellas in a blow-dryer breeze. The building, like most in Dallas, was well air-conditioned, but ubiquitous in the 80s suburban style: box-shaped, beige, and generally cardboard-like.
I eyed the crooked, elfin-looking cone. And immediately I softened. What I felt about my ice cream was something that bordered on tenderness. It seemed equally serious, like a chubby baby, and trusting trashy, like your wino aunt who moved to Miami and always smells like self-tanner. And the tiered chocolate bowl gave it the shape of a pretty little dog shit.
With its slogan wrapper “Happy Tastes Good”, the DQ diving cone on a budget cruise would be just the thing for a good time, not a long time.
[ad_1]