Is it nuts to assume a scoop of pistachio ice cream should contain actual pistachios? Or how about real butter in a dish of butter pecan?
Such weighty questions about a favorite summertime confection could soon be decided by the courts.
A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a Long Island woman’s class action lawsuit that claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”
Lead plaintiff Jenna Marie Duncan purchased her serving of pistachio ice cream from a Cold Stone Creamery store in Levittown, New York, in or around July 2022. According her lawsuit, Duncan “reasonably believed that the Pistachio ice cream she purchased from defendant contained pistachio.”
Vanilla is a pretty expensive spice and vanillin can be synthesized from oil or wood, you should probably assume most things vanilla flavored are artificially flavored. There is way more demand for vanilla than the amount of vanilla pods grown in the world.
Also, the little flecks of vanilla bean in ice cream is often not vanilla bean.
Nor, as I have learned, are there sufficient strawberries in the world to flavor the “strawberry” ice consumed in the US.
Luckily, one can create “natural strawberry flavor” by pressure cooking pine wood shavings in alcohol.