Ice Cream For Breakfast Day

What the day is

Ice Cream for Breakfast Day is held on the first Saturday of February, so the date moves each year. Its origin is unusually well documented for a novelty observance.

Origin and background

It was invented in the mid-1960s by Florence Rappaport in Rochester, New York. The account given by her family is that a heavy snowfall had left her children stuck indoors and restless, and she announced ice cream for breakfast to redeem the morning. The children remembered it, asked for it the following year, and kept it going into adulthood, spreading it to other countries as the family traveled. It is now marked in dozens of countries, frequently as a fundraiser.

The nutritional objection is weaker than it first appears. A bowl of ice cream and a bowl of many sweetened breakfast cereals are closer in sugar than most people assume, and the ice cream contains rather more protein and fat, which slows absorption. This is not an argument for ice cream as a daily breakfast; it is an argument that the line between breakfast food and dessert is largely convention.

There is a genuine sensory reason ice cream tastes as it does at that hour. Cold suppresses the perception of sweetness, so ice cream is formulated with considerably more sugar than it appears to contain. Anyone who has tasted a melted bowl knows how sweet it is at room temperature, and that is what you were actually eating.

The traditional observance is done properly: bowls, toppings, and no pretense that it is a smoothie.

How to take part

• Have it for breakfast, once, and enjoy it without justification.
• Let a bowl melt and taste it, which reveals the actual sugar content.
• Run it as a fundraiser, which is what many schools now do with it.
• Check the date each year, since it moves with the first Saturday.
• Put out proper toppings. The day rewards commitment.