Dippin’ Dots Are the Ice Cream of the Future and Also So Much of the Present

On a recent family outing, I came to the sudden realization that Dippin’ Dots has a near-stranglehold on the small zoo dining economy. I don’t mean the flagpole establishments – your San Diegos, your Bronxes, your Brookfields — the kind that have giant pandas and proprietary, conservation-themed restaurants, the kind that people might plan an entire vacation around. Rather, it’s those middle-of-the-road establishments, which may be more sophisticated than a roadside petting zoo, but which would nevertheless require a concerted effort to spend more than two hours therein. You would probably have to double back to look at the otters again in order to do so.

They will have foregone printed maps for a scannable QR code, although realistically you will not need either to navigate the grounds, because every exhibit is arranged along the same ring road. There is no need for choice, discernment, or the subordination of one desire for another. “Where shall we start?” is a question for the kind of zoos with themed parking lots. Here you can see it all. You need only to walk forward in order to get to wherever you’re going. 

These zoos will have a commemorative penny-pressing machine, and a wooden backdrop with parrots or monkeys painted on it, and a few circle cutouts for visitors to stick their head through before taking family portraits. There will be at least one empty exhibit which used to house an injured snake or wildcat who has lately been reintroduced into the local ecosystem. They will have prairie dogs, not flamingos, and they will be big on the local ecosystem. Their enthusiasm for the local ecosystem will be so intense they might try to get away with featuring an exhibit of ravens, or squirrels, or another workaday animal. 

They will have at least one non-releasable hawk or eagle who can skip pretty ably along the three lengths of downed trees that now comprise their entire world, and glare. These zoos will not have a restaurant. They will have a snack shop or a canteen about two-thirds of the way through. At most they will have a grill, although this will be a misnomer, since the only hot foods on offer will be onion rings and french fries. Possibly grilled cheese and chicken fingers, if you are lucky, although you should not get the chicken fingers. The grilled cheese will be fine, but the chicken fingers will disappoint. Chicken fingers rarely disappoint, but here they will and I must urge you not to order them. 

And they will of course sell Dippin’ Dots. You are almost certainly familiar with Dippin’ Dots, which have been marketed as “the ice cream of the future” for so long that this association now feels enjoyably dated, and a person may order it more for the pleasure of experiencing a nostalgic recollection of vanished futures than for any other reason. You receive a little cup of flash-frozen pebbles, as if a scoop of ice cream had been divided into atomic parts, along with a little spoon to ferry the pebbles to your mouth. You will drop at least some of them on the way, but it will hardly matter. At first the pebbles will be so cold they will exhale a puff of vapor as they cross your lips, and lightly burn your tongue. This will not matter very much either as the cold is enough to numb your enjoyment to a tolerable degree, not enough to hurt.

Dippin’ Dots is the official snack of the underdog and the second-rate. You can find them at Six Flags, not Disneyland; at Triple-A parks, not major league games; in low-traffic airport terminals and struggling malls, and at little zoos, not big ones. If the zoo has more than one exhibit featuring charismatic megafauna (your local zoo may have up to a single antisocial rhino, who cannot get along with other rhinos at the bigger zoos, or an old giraffe, but no more than that), they will sell ice cream sandwiches, novelty ice pops, or even gelato. 

Just as some foods are known to pair best with particular wines or liqueurs, certain foods are better-adapted to particular experiences. Good ice cream is very good indeed, but it requires the luxury of time to savor it, to allow the butterfat to properly melt over the tongue, and if children are part of the equation, the luxury of many napkins. Strolling through the kind of middling zoo where local billboards and gas station signs are still visible above the treeline does not call for a dish of regular ice cream, any more than a bag of movie popcorn calls for a caviar topping. Dippin’ Dots are good, but they are not too good for a small zoo. 

It is not possible for a small, highly-strung child to overeat Dippin’ Dots in a fit of excitement, for example. It is very easy – too easy – for a small, highly-strung child to overeat regular ice cream in a fit of excitement, even to the point of discharging it. In a cup of Dippin’ Dots, the pleasure of eating ice cream has been appropriately moderated. You can shove as many of the Dippin’ Dots pebbles over your tongue as you like, but even if they melt all at once, they cannot deliver a sensation of extravagance.

I do not speak here of legal definitions but of fundamental truths: Dippin’ Dots taste like eating ice cream, but that is not the same thing as eating ice cream. It is as much fun as seeing a few otters, a flightless hawk, and learning a few facts about bats from a wooden placard while the bat house is closed and undergoing repairs. It is not as fun as seeing a family of elephants, but then, one does not need to have that kind of fun on any given Tuesday afternoon.