First I must say that of all the New England states Vermont is my favorite. Every time I visit I am stunned by how gorgeous it is and how many delightfully weird people live there. On this particular excursion I drove 5.5 hours from Rhode Island to see the irreverent comedy stylings of Lucy Darling. The show was well worth the drive. That night I slept under a tin roof while it rained and slept like a goddamn baby! Surrounded by mountains, forests, and farmland I didn’t want to leave but unfortunately we all have lives to get back to. That didn’t however mean we couldn’t make time for one little stop to poke around…. which ended up being the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory.
It was easy to find, using a highway “that closes in winter because there’s nowhere to put the snow.” The parking lot was… a weird winding Byzantine maze that made very little sense but right next to it was the infamous ice cream flavor graveyard.
I’ve seen photos before but for some reason I didn’t expect them to be real slate gravestones! They were all fenced in like a tiny family cemetery you’d find at the sight of an old farmhouse. But they were colorful and each had a pithy rhyme about their demise. It was so quintessentially Vermont for me, just leaning into the weird and whimsical. And there were people reading them all like we were. A fun moment for sure. Although many of these flavors sounded fantastic so I don’t know why they’ve been relegated to the flavor cemetery. Others…. well, let’s just say as much as I love sweet potato pie I’m not convinced that would have been a hit ice cream flavor.
We walked past a little playground towards the factory where there was a place to create tye dye T-shirts and to buy yourself an ice cream cone. Also a ticket booth for factory tours which on this day was only $6 a person! We would have done that if we weren’t on a time crunch. Instead we poked around the gift shop, grabbing a VW Bus shaped pin and leafing through the pages of two tell all exposes about fighting for the soul of the company. Ben and Jerry’s for a long time was a really good company to work for. They gave stocks to the people sewing their T-shirts and stood at the forefront of social justice… until they made the mistake of making a board of executives who threw these founding visionaries under a bus in favor of corporate greed. I’d be pissed too. Maybe even enough to write two books worth of greivancs.
Their T-shirts were really decent quality, the stretchy material T-shirts used to be made of and were quite cute but I was running low on funds and couldn’t afford the $30, instead opting for a pin to add to my overloved purse.
Someday I likely will come back to do a factory tour and probably buy a T-shirt and a book. All and all it was a cute little distraction for a bit.
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