As a student attending Syracuse University (SU) I often made the trek by car from Syracuse to my hometown on Croton on Hudson via route 17. If you’re from metropolitan New York and attended Cornel, Ithaca College, SUNY Binghamton and I host of other schools in that region you probably know route 17. This is story about my all time favorite ice cream flavor which I found on 17 in a small hamlet. 17 has a host of these small towns one after the other with small country stores and gas stations that sell snacks. There is also the famous Roscoe Dinner. Truth be told I’ve never eaten at Roscoe’s have you? The provincial cities of Binghamton and Cortland are the exception to the small towns and they offer more food options but in reality not much more if again you come from metropolitan New York. I attended SU as an undergrad and graduate student. But it was not until grad school that one day between 1992 and 1995 I stopped at a gas station off of 17 to fill up on fuel and food. That’s when I found it—Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch Ice Cream! It had vanilla ice cream with chunks of cashew and Brazil nut in a buttery caramel crunch mixture. Ben & Jerry's began producing the favor in 1989 and marketed it as eco-friendly product. The sale pitch on the container insisted that the company sourced the nuts from cooperatives in their native Brazil and the revenue helped poor rainforest people earn a living, reduced the practice of clear-cutting the rainforests, and promoted sustainability. Rainforest Crunch quickly became a best seller for Ben & Jerry’s and that off the beaten path gas station between Elmira and Binghamton became a regular pit stop. Ben & Jerry’s discontinued the product when the news broke that the eco-friendly part of the equation proved false as the company began to source the ingredients from agro-exporters in Brazil instead of cooperatives. In 1995 my favorite ice cream disappeared from my route 17 freezer as the Vermont based company discontinued it as part of its damage control measures to protect its eco-friendly image and overall sales.
Boston Globe article on the Rainforest Crunch scandal: http://www.jonentine.com/articles/boston_globe.htm
Ben and Jerry and Brazil: http://www1.american.edu/ted/ben.htm
Folks are still talking about Rainforest Crunch: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=10461186460&topic=4589
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