The good folks at Ben & Jerry’s have had fun over the years looking to movies, music and television to find inspiration for new ice cream flavors. Cherry Garcia, Phish Food, Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream, Willie Nelson’s Country Peach Cobbler and Vermonty Python are among the prominent examples. Late Night Snack pays homage to Jimmy Fallon, while Imagine Whirled Peace is an ode à la mode to John Lennon. The latest addition to Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream-meets-pop-culture gallery is Schweddy Balls, inspired by the famous Saturday Night Live sketch starring Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer as the hosts of NPR’s Delicious Dish, and Alec Baldwin as their guest, Pete Schweddy.
If you will:
The new flavor was announced last week, and I gotta say, it sounds pretty tasty. It hasn’t reached my local supermarket, but I’ll be trying it out as soon as it does. That is, unless an uptight, conservative advocacy group called One Million Moms gets in the way. One Million Moms has taken offense to the title of this testicular particular flavor, and is calling for a boycott while requesting that Ben & Jerry’s stop production and distribution of future batches. One Million Moms, like its parent organization the American Family Association, is one of these hate-mongering religious associations that practices intolerance but hides behind words to which no decent person would think to object. Words like “family” and “moms.” The American Family Association is the same group that recently lashed out at ABC and Dancing with the Stars for featuring Chaz Bono on its new season. After all, how can good, wholesome American families watch the show now that abominable Bono is flaunting his transgender agenda?
In the case of Schweddy Balls, One Million Moms isn’t promoting bigotry, but merely good taste. They call the name “vulgar” and say that it’s not something they would want children asking for in the grocery store. The form letter they ask their members to send states that the flavor is “disrespectful to me personally, and to my family.” I’m not sure why this should be so, since nobody ever started a family without some schweddy balls in the mix. Anyway, the solution to their problem is simple: they don’t need to buy it. Ben & Jerry’s offers a wide variety of flavors that surely meet their standards of decency, and the younger kids probably don’t even know that such a flavor as Schweddy Balls exists. If they do know, it’s likely because they hear you harping on about it to your husband, or on the phone with one of the other 999,999 moms. The group does note that this is not the first time Ben & Jerry’s has upset them, citing 2009’s temporary re-branding of Chubby Hubby to Hubby Hubby, in celebration of Vermont’s legalization of gay marriage. “It seems that offending customers has become an annual tradition for Ben & Jerry’s,” their statement reads. I think it’s safe to say, however, that plenty of customers are not at all offended by these irreverent names. And frankly, I’m surprised these conservative groups would indulge in the first place in any product coming out of somewhere as liberal as Vermont.
I think those of us with a sense of humor and a belief in equality stand by Ben & Jerry’s, and can rest assured that the company will not bow to One Million Moms’ request. Yet I’d like to see them go even further. Schweddy Balls is currently set as a limited batch, planned to be available through the holiday season, with the possibility of sticking around longer. I hope Ben & Jerry’s will rebuff One Million Moms by making Schweddy Balls a permanent flavor, but I also think they should double-down on their commitment to scrotum-inspired ice cream flavors by producing a companion batch, influenced by South Park: Chef’s Salty Chocolate Balls. I leave it to the Flavor Gurus to attempt concockting concocting such a flavor, and getting it into testes testing for release into the marketplace as soon as possible.
In the meantime, I suggest the ladies of One Million Moms make their peace with Schweddy Balls by sucking it.
I Am DB 