Politics is like ice cream, you need to do a bit of research before deciding

If “mama always said life is like a box of chocolates,” then this hungry editor says politics is like a tub of ice cream. The packaging can be deceitful since it is designed to be as appealing as possible.

As a bachelor 20-something who runs way too much, I live for ice cream and when a craving strikes nothing can get in my way from having some.

Nothing, except fine print and a rushed trip to the grocery store after hiking all day.

Let’s rewind this hyperbolic monologue back to August, when I bought a half-gallon of Great Value ice cream. Money was tighter than usual, sacrifices had to be made after splurging on more funnel cakes at the fair than I care to admit. So, I breezed past the allure of my usual name-brand frozen treats and opted for Wal-Mart’s version of chocolate chip cookie dough.

Normally, I really can’t tell the difference between the name-brand and store-brand food so I thought ice cream wouldn’t be too different. After all, how can you go wrong when cookie dough is involved?

I took my thrifty purchase home, grabbed a spoon and dug in.

The ice cream portion was fine, in fact it was downright tasty. The chocolate chips were passable, more on par with baking chocolate, but whatever.

The cookie dough was a little funky looking, strikingly similar to dog food. Oh well, bachelors don’t care how it looks so long as it tastes good.

Chocolate chip cookie dust.

I ate around it like a finicky child does with unwanted vegetables at the dinner table.

After a month of begrudgingly nibbling on it, I finally finished the box and eagerly anticipated my next grocery trip.

Flavor was long past due, and I was seeking junk food retribution.

Forget the budget, I was rolling high this month. I went for some Breyers chocolate chip cookie dough. The packaging was fancy and had a beautiful image of a bowl of ice cream with glorious gobs of cookie dough mixed throughout with a texture that popped off the plastic and radiated phenomenal flavor.

Much like when listening to a political speech where it’s easy to become fixated on a few talking points, I was fixated on that mouthwatering image and a few select words: “chocolate chip cookie dough.”

Taxes, education, energy, Citizen’s United, gun laws, marijuana laws, abortion, gay marriage and more. It’s just as easy to cherry-pick what sounds good and ignore the rest when selecting a candidate.

Does agreeing on one issue really outweigh the rest? Are all of the ingredients real food, or only some of them?

I waited to try it until after my daily half-marathon run the next day. I was going to do this properly and savor every morsel. (Note, the ice cream had been in the freezer for nearly 24 hours, any melting from the drive home was definitely remedied.)

My spoon sunk all the way to the bottom of the box, as if I had just plunged into a tub of mayonnaise.

Maybe it’s just really organic? My great-grandma used to make homemade ice cream when I was a kid, and hers wasn’t exactly dense. Surely this must be the case.

I pulled out my spoon, gave it a taste and twitched.

The segments of “1984” where saccharine sweetener is used to describe a dystopic future came to mind.

This was so not right.

Maybe the smokey atmosphere I was breathing while running messed with my taste buds? I rinsed out my mouth, drank some water, and gave it another go.

It was like taking a mouth-full of Karo syrup.

That’s when I noticed the box.

It didn’t say “ice cream” anywhere. “Breyers,” the brand name, was the largest word, and then below it read “chocolate chip cookie dough” and then at the very bottom, in small type halfway hidden by frost, it read “frozen dairy dessert.”

A quick turnaround of the box revealed the ingredients: milk, sugar, corn syrup, cream, whey, mono and diglycerides, guar gum, garob bean gum, natural flavor, carrageenan, annatto (for color), vitamin A palmitate, and tara gum for the “dairy dessert” portion.

Aren’t the only necessary ingredients the first, second, and fourth ones?

So, the devil was in the details. In this case, the contents, the real deal, was found in the fine print — what was hidden behind the frost, the words that sounded like it’s something it’s not.

Much like any politician’s speech with promises for a better tomorrow, this “frozen dairy dessert’s” packaging showed me exactly what I wanted to have and I was tricked because I didn’t look at all the details and I didn’t do any research before trying something new.