First it was breast milk ice cream--now a dessert with bugs is on watch. An ice cream shop's been asked to cool things, after bugs in its popular cicada flavor received health officials' attention.
Supposedly ice cream store customers can't get enough of the new cicada scoops -- the Missouri store, Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream, sold out out of the bug-inspired flavor within just hours of the dessert's June 1 debut.
New and odd ingredients have become a trend in the ice cream industry -- globally and nationwide.
Just months ago, the London-based store "Icecreamists" got its supply of a main ingredient--for what it dubbed the "Baby Gaga" flavor--from mother's milk of women respondents to an online ad. The ice cream product was officially confiscated from the ice cream store after just days, after concerns of donors, as the question arose as to whether a food shop should be selling edibles produced from other people's bodily fluids, Breast milk had been donated by 15 different women, in order for the Icecreamists store to produce the ice cream. Those breast milk donors were discovered through advertisements, the women paid for the mother's milk "donations" used to make the flavor.
Now a Missouri, United States, ice cream store faces kind of a similar issue -- though, thankfully, not based on use of bodily fluids in a food. The "harvest" of cicadas used in the Columbia shop's flavor came from a collection apparently harvested by employees, who discovered the bugs right in their own backyards. Most of the dead bugs' wings were removed at or after collection and before the cicadas were boiled, then covered in brown sugar and milk chocolate.
It may all sound bad, but possibly a lot less bad than other things. Not a lot can go wrong when heaps of sugar and chocolate are in the mix -- and the ice cream's base is also a brown sugar and butter flavor.
Maybe it's all ok, as long as you don't get a stray wing in your teeth.
In the meantime, the cicada ice cream production by Sparky's has -- at least temporarily -- been put on hold. Environmental health chief with the Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health, Gerry Worley, apparently wants the cicada use in ice cream production to stop -- advising against use of the bugs as a food product. The problem seems to center around the fact that the county food code "doesn't directly address cicadas."
Supposedly the Missouri ice cream store will have the go-ahead for cicada ice cream, per health officials, if the parlor can find a licensed supplier of cicadas. The odds of finding a license supplier of bugs are probably slim -- and it's all a little odd to be arguing about where the cicadas come from, since the the county's food code doesn't even address use of the bugs.
Seems like Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream may have a little wiggle room there.