Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (3 page)
Read Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Online
Authors: David Feldman
W
e have to admit ambivalence about packing peanuts—those bite-sized treats you find in shipping boxes. They do a wonderful job of protecting stuff. But they also do a fabulous job of landing all over the carpet and exhibiting static clingsmanship of the highest order.
Before packing peanuts, most shippers were content to protect merchandise with excelsior (shaved wood) or wadded-up newspapers. But a man named Arthur Graham had a better idea. Graham sold soda fountain supplies, such as ice cream cones and straws. During the manufacturing process, Graham was left with soda straw trimmings. “What could these by-products be used for?” he must have pondered.
Graham sold his “waste” to Gump’s, the renowned department store in San Francisco, which had previously used excelsior as its packing material of choice. Soon, Graham had interested a defense contractor in buying much more of his straw trimmings, until the tail started wagging the dog—goodbye soda fountain business, hello wonderful world of packing materials.
The one flaw in paper as packing material is that it is relatively heavy. Graham traveled to Germany with an engineer to talk to the folks at BASF about polystyrene, and the rest is peanut history. In 1967, Graham incorporated Free-Flow Packaging (FP International), and the company still sells 100 percent recycled polystyrene “peanuts.” You’ve undoubtedly seen FPI’s peanuts—they are tube-shaped with a pinch in the middle a figure eight), betraying its paper straw ancestry (you can check them out yourself at http://www.fpintl.com/fpfp_htm).
According to Virginia Lytle of FPI, the pinch gave the peanut more stability, and the shape allowed it to interlock with its fellow eights and cushion the object sent. FPI calls its peanuts “Flo-Pak loose fill” and it is essentially the same product Graham originally invented, only with more air than the original. FPI patented the configuration of its Flo-Pak, so all of its imitators were forced to invent their own shape.
Unlike the harder foam inserts that hold electronics equipment shipped in boxes, loose fill such as peanuts is most effective when they are not rigid (most peanuts are approximately 95 percent air). Robert Krebs, of the American Chemistry Council, notes that
the oddness of the shape gives extra cushioning and flexion as a package is put within them, and [the space in the cushion they make] can change shape much more easily when the contours are not so uniform.
We spoke to Tom Eckel, senior vice president of Storopack, the largest manufacturer of polystyrene packaging, who told
Imponderables
that every manufacturer thinks that its shape is the best—Eckel has a display board showing 35 different peanut shapes. Before committing to its choice, Storopack thoroughly researched the possibilities and hasn’t changed its shape in ten years. Any contour that allows the peanuts to interlock to a certain extent but not settle into a mass is prized: the fewer the peanuts and the more air in the box, the lower the shipping costs for the sender.
Two more mini-Imponderables: If packing peanuts are made out of 100% recycled polystyrene, can you recycle yours? In the United States, at least, the Plastic Loose Fill Council will be more than happy to take them off your hands. Just call The Peanut Hotline at (800) 828-2214 and they’ll direct you to a business in your community that will take them.
And even more pressing, when shipping their wares around the country, do packing peanut manufacturers protect the valuable merchandise by packing them in, er, packing peanuts?
Submitted by Eric Weiner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
G
rape is a popular flavor for juice and candy—why not ice cream? Last we heard, wine was rather popular, too. When faced with this Imponderable, our sources buckled like a cheap umbrella. Carol Christison, executive director of the International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association, wrote:
You can’t buy it because no one makes it.
OK, OK, I really don’t know. I’m sure there are some ice cream associations that might know. They make garlic ice cream, so why not grape?
Why not, indeed? It’s true that we found no groundswell of outrage among consumers that grape ice cream isn’t available (while pink bubblegum and licorice are!). Indeed, a representative from Häagen-Dazs that we contacted claimed there was “no demand from consumers” for it.
The more we pursued the problem with ice cream makers, the more they decried the lack of flavor in grapes. A flavor guru from Ben & Jerry’s told us
One of the reasons we’ve never done a grape ice cream is because there would hardly be any taste to it. While grapes are a tasty snack, they are mostly water and don’t pack a whole lot of flavor. Most of the “grape” flavored snacks that we enjoy are artificially flavored to be much stronger than what natural grape flavoring would provide.
In actuality, we do use grape juice concentrate as one of the main ingredients for our line of Body & Soul ice creams [Ben & Jerry’s low-carbohydrate, low-fat line of ice cream and yogurts] because the juice gives us a natural way to reduce the sugar added in.
If you look at the nutritional label of many fruit juices, especially berry juices, you’ll see grape juice listed as the first ingredient. Grape juice is prized precisely because of its lack of flavor—it is used to sweeten cranberry juice, for example, but is mild enough not to distract from the cranberry taste. By using the cheaper grape juice, marketers can also trumpet “100% juice” on the labels.
Bob Graeter, the vice president of operations at what many dessert fanatics consider to be a premier American ice cream maker, Cincinnati’s Graeter’s, told
Imponderables
a similar tale of woe about the grape’s lack of flavor. One of Graeter’s franchisees once made a moderately popular grape sorbet, but it was artificially flavored, and
that may be the only way to get enough grape flavor to get a good flavored sorbet or ice cream. This may be an issue as to why no one else is doing a grape-flavored ice cream or sorbet product. Our direction is to use all natural flavors in our ice cream products.
Although we have not been able to find a single grape ice cream specimen, we have found scattered sightings of grape frozen confections. Of course, grape Popsicles have been a staple for almost 100 years. Nestlé Ice Cream sells a grape sherbet as part of its Push-Up line. And Baskin-Robbins told us they occasionally offer a “purple grape-flavored ice.” What do all of these frozen grape products have in common? None of the desserts except for the Nestlé Push-Up contains any dairy products, and sherbet contains only a little.
If someone provided a great grape ice cream, demand would follow. Ultimately, we think that the bad karma between grape and dairy is the villain here. We wrote to Meredith Kurtzman, who makes extraordinary frozen desserts. Although her repertoire includes exotica such as her signature olive oil gelato at New York’s Otto restaurant, and more to the point, a mean Concord grape sorbet, “What’s the deal?” we asked her. “You can make great ice cream out of olive oil and rice flavors but not grape?” Kurtzman responded:
Grape ice cream is possible to make, but I don’t think that the flavor of grapes is strong enough to shine through a milk base. When one is making any ice cream from fruit, you have to avoid too much water present in fruit, which will make the product more icy then you might like. But then you can’t add too many solids either, because they stiffen up the texture.
There are many ways to compensate for both of these factors, but that’s a chapter in itself, that I’m not ready to write…yet.
Yet? Yet? Do I sense a cliffhanger? Will Kurtzman eliminate this Imponderable single-handedly? Hang on.
Submitted by Michael Johnson of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
STOP THE PRESSES!
We have found grape ice cream. For more than thirty years, Tony’s Ice Cream in Gastonia, North Carolina ( just outside of Charlotte) has been selling grape ice cream. We spoke to patriarch Louis Coletta, the third-generation proprietor (whose children now work at the store), who told us the story of his shop and his purple ice cream.
Louis’s grandfather started selling his handmade ice cream from a push cart, one bucket at a time. As he prospered, he switched to horse-drawn carts and eventually motorized trucks. The current store opened in 1947, but the object of our story, grape ice cream, wasn’t introduced until the 1970s—Coletta doesn’t remember the exact date of his momentous contribution to ice cream history.
When his father’s health was failing, Louis, an industrial engineer, came back to run the family business. Coletta remembers grapevines always growing around his family’s house, and told
Imponderables
that the reasons for offering the new flavor were twofold—it was a tribute to the family’s Italian heritage, and it was designed to appeal to kids.
Coletta confirms all the problems with creating grape ice cream that our other experts detailed. Tony’s has experimented using real grapes, but found that seeds were a problem, the grapes with good flavor were too sour, and the texture was wrong. So although all of Tony’s ice cream is made at a plant next door to the shop, using natural ingredients whenever possible, the only solution to the problem was to use artificial grape flavor.
Grape has proven to be one of Tony’s most popular flavors, not only in cups and cones, but in milk shakes. As the family anticipated, grape ice cream is most popular with kids, but Coletta reports that another demographic group goes bonkers for grape ice cream, too—pregnant women. Want to see what drives Gastonians wild? Check out the grape ice cream photos at http://www.imponderables.com/gastonia.php.
P.S. Tony’s is not alone. James Bristow, a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, who photographed Tony’s grape ice cream for our Web site, was nonplussed when contacted about our exciting find. “There’s another place with grape ice cream a few miles away—Bruster’s.”
Right he was. Bruster’s Ice Cream is a rapidly growing chain of more than 200 ice cream stores. Started as one family-run store in 1989 by Bruce Reed, Bruster’s introduced grape ice cream shortly after it opened. According to Reed, kids requested the flavor. We spoke to Christina Parker, vice president of operations, who told us that Bruster’s grape ice cream was also made from artificial flavoring, and that the flavor is still popular among children, especially in the summer. And if grape ice cream seems a little mundane for the kiddies, they can also sample other flavors such as blue pop, watermelon, purple dinosaur, cotton candy explosion (with chocolate-covered Pop Rocks), and our favorite, birthday cake (with icing and sprinkles, and presumably no candles).
