Is your favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor lurking in the Flavor Graveyard? Genealogists can visit an online, somewhat animated, version of this graveyard (that actually does exist outside of the internet). It can be fun to explore the “family history” of some of the flavors that have “passed away”.
Sometimes, it’s good to have a bit of fun with genealogy. Halloween is in October, and this holiday makes a lot of people think about graveyards, ghosts, and scary stories. Genealogists who cannot get their family to accompany them to a cemetery might be able to talk them into a tour of the “Flavor Graveyard”.
Ben & Jerry’s is a company that makes ice cream. They have a tendency to create imaginative flavor combinations, and give them trendy, amusing, names. Every so often, for whatever reason, the company decides to stop making a certain flavor of their ice cream. This unfortunate, “retired”, flavor gets put in the “Flavor Graveyard”. The loss of this flavor is then lamented by its fans, who can no longer find it in their grocery stores.
The Ben & Jerry’s “Flavor Graveyard” actually exists. You can visit this graveyard when you take a tour of the Ben & Jerry’s factory that is located in Waterbury, Vermont.
Each flavor that is “resting” in this graveyard has its own gravestone, (but I doubt they are actually made of stone). The graves say the name of the flavor, its “birthdate” and the day it was “retired” forever. It also has a clever description of what the flavor was, and perhaps even what lead to its demise. This is the same sort of information that genealogists look for on real gravestones.
If you cannot travel to Vermont, you should check out the webpage for Ben & Jerry’s “Flavor Graveyard”. I think this could be something that they are doing to celebrate Halloween. It is an animated, interactive, virtual graveyard, complete with sound effects. Click on a gravestone to “research” a particular flavor of ice cream.
There is a flavor named “Ethan Almond”. This almost sounds like a person’s name. Ethan existed for less than a year in 1998. The tombstone reads: “In memory of nuts, and Green Mountain Boys, Here history shuts, The pint on their joys”.
This flavor has an interesting history. It was named after Ethan Allen, who was an American Revolutionary War patriot, and one of the founders of the state of Vermont. The flavor “Ethan Almond” was released in 1988 in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of Ethan Allen’s death. The flavor contained vanilla ice cream, and chocolate covered almonds.
“Economic Crunch” is another interesting flavor. It existed for a brief time in 1987. This flavor’s tombstone reads: “A delightful mash, This flavor we remember, For the stock market crash, On the sixth of November”.
Ben & Jerry’s created this flavor when the stock markets around the world crashed in 1987. They drove their free scoop vehicle to Wall Street and handed it out to stockbrokers. “Economic Crunch” was made up of vanilla ice cream, with chocolate covered almonds, pecans, and walnuts.
Image by Doug Kerr on Flickr