The Ice Cream War

This is the story of the Ice Cream War that took place between my little brother and I when we were kids.

I was born into a family of four brothers with myself in the middle, two elder ones and a younger one. The four of us grew up in Kuwait, a small country in the Middle East. Now as far as I’m concerned, Kuwait has one of the best Ice cream companies in the world: the Kuwait Danish Dairy or KDD for short.

KDD has a number of product lines, chief among them are the “Golden” and “Silver” ice cream cones. The “Golden” ice cream cone, so called because of its golden wrapper, is a vanilla cone topped with an assortment of nuts and drizzled with smooth chocolate syrup! Meanwhile, the “Silver” cone, named after it’s silver wrapper, consists of creamy milk chocolate filled with delicious caramel and topped off with chocolate chips!

So in the early days, my household was a vanilla only household, thank you very much, and this was due to the fact that Vanilla was the only flavour of ice cream that my parents could tolerate. Every weekend, my dad would head on over to the grocery store and buy a dozen Golden ice cream cones and my brothers and I would eat them over the course of the week, usually after dinner whilst watching television.

One thing I noticed, however, was that even though I liked the Golden ice cream, almost everyone at school was crazy about the Silver one. In fact, I was probably the only one in my class who ate Vanilla at all! I was curious to see what the big fuss was about so the next time my dad and I went to the grocery store, I asked my dad “Can I please have the Silver ice cream cone instead of the Golden one?”

“The Silver one is chocolate. Have you ever tried Chocolate before?”

“No, but I’d like to”

“Go ahead then, but make sure you finish it!”

So as we walked out of the grocery store, I removed the silver packaging and had my first ever bite of Chocolate. It was heaven; the sweet taste of chocolate, the crunch of the chocolate chips and oh, that caramel — it was an incredible sensation! My dad asked what I thought of the new flavour and I told him I absolutely loved it:

“Dad, from now on, can you please get the golden vanilla cones for my brothers but the silver chocolate ones for me?”

“No problem!” he replied.

So it came to be that while my three brothers had to share the Golden ice cream cones amongst themselves, I had a tidy supply of Silver Ice cream cones just for me. This fact did not go unnoticed by my little brother who realised one day, when we were watching TV and were all out of vanilla, that I was happily eating a Chocolate ice cream cone, as delighted as can be. He came over to me and asked “Can I please try of some of that?”

“NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!! THE CHOCOLATE ICE CREAMS ARE MINE, NOT YOURS!” (Needless to say, my little brother and I did not get along when we were kids!)

This situation presented a conundrum for my little brother. The fact that I had ice cream while he didn’t was not only unfair, but it was totally unacceptable! He could of course go up to my dad and ask that he buy more Vanilla ice cream but that would lead to the dreaded Banana Talk!

The Banana Talk was a long sermon doled out by my dad concerning how the four of us didn’t eat enough fruit. It usually went along the lines of “I bought a dozen bananas this weekend, A DOZEN, thinking that you lot would eat them all but looking at the fruit basket, all I see are 12 blackened, shrivelled twigs that died from a total lack of attention! And yet, here you are, asking me to buy even more ice cream!! For God’s sake, eat some fruit, it won’t kill you!!” So, No, asking my dad for more vanilla ice cream was out of the question. What he needed was an ice cream flavour entirely unto himself and no one else! Thus, my little brother walked up to my dad one day and said “Dad, I don’t like vanilla ice cream anymore. From now on, I only eat strawberry! So can you please buy chocolate for Waqqas, Strawberry for me, and Vanilla for the rest”

My dad agreed to this request but I imagine his internal monologue went something like “Holy cow! That’s a lot of ice cream” because the very next week, instead of brining in a bag of ice cream cones, he brought in one big box of 3-in-1 ice cream flavours consisting of Vanilla, Strawberry and Chocolate! There were three flavours in that box, and all three of them SUCKED! To this day, I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted ice cream that horrible. I mean, the manufacturers got the “ice” part of “ice cream” right, you could definitely taste the ice! They even got the flavour right to a degree in that you could detect that there was a hint of chocolate in that ice but there was no gosh darned CREAM!!!

Those were dark days in our household: my two eldest brothers had one-sixth of Vanilla each; I ate the chocolate, sure, but it was out necessity, I didn’t enjoy it! My little brother was the only one who insisted that he was happy with the arrangement and genuinely enjoyed eating Strawberry ice cream! But we knew, the three of us all knew he was lying! And it was only a matter of time before he cracked!

Lo and Behold, my brother did eventually crack when he went up to my dad and said “You know what, Dad, I’ve gone off Strawberry ice cream now, and I’ve taken to Tutti frutti”. I have to admit, this was a brilliant scheme! There were no boxes of 3-in-1 ice cream with Chocolate, Vanilla and Tutti Frutti, no sirree! So we were back to 6 vanilla cones, 3 chocolate cones, and a small box of Tutti frutti for my little brother. Except there was a tiny flaw in my little brother’s otherwise ingenious plan … us three elder brothers didn’t really mind Tutti frutti so when we ran out of our supply of ice cream, we shamelessly invaded his; and he being the youngest in the family was powerless to do anything about it!

The Ice Cream War ended when the four of us agreed that we’d each take one for the team and ensure that all the bananas were eaten by the end of the week and, using that as leverage, we would ask our dad to bring in a bit more ice cream!

But I think a much happier ending to this story happened many many years later when one day my little brother and I were hanging out, I was eating chocolate ice cream and he asked “It looks like cow dung, how can you eat that stuff!”

“It tastes so amazing, you wouldn’t believe it!”

“Can I try some?”

“Sure!”

“HOLY SHIT, THIS IS ACTUALLY GOOD!”

“I KNOW RIGHT!”

“I CAN’T BELIEVE I’VE NEVER TRIED THIS BEFORE! THIS IS AMAZING”

To this day, my little brother and I are the only ones in the family who genuinely love Chocolate!