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I scream for Darfur /Ice-cream for Darfur

From ‘Cookies and Scream’ to ‘Honeycaust’, an ice-cream company is looking for a tasty new flavour to raise awareness about genocide.

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer

Topics World

A leading ice-cream manufacturer well known for its quirkily named flavours has launched a competition to find a new flavour that tastes delicious and raises awareness about the genocide in Darfur.

Following the founding of the campaign group Dream for Darfur, which is encouraging people to agitate against China over its support for the genocidal regime in Khartoum, the ice-cream makers are planning to launch a new outfit – Ice Cream for Darfur/I Scream for Darfur – which will create a mouth-watering Darfur Dessert that will be ‘food for the soul as well as for the stomach’.

There’s already a flurry of suggested names for the new flavour. One is ‘Cookies and Scream’, a creamy vanilla-based ice-cream with broken chunks of cookie that symbolise Darfurians’ broken lives. Another is ‘Geno-mudslide’, a coffee-flavoured, mud-chocolate concoction which will have ‘Two Facts About Darfur’ on the side of the tub: ‘1) Genocide bad; 2) China helping’, which, as the New York Times Magazine reported at the weekend, is the working slogan of Dream for Darfur (1).

Another suggestion is ‘Diplomatic Fudge’, a scrumptious toffee-flavoured ice-cream with fudge chunks, designed to raise awareness about Western dithering over Darfur. In keeping with the ice-cream company’s love of all things English, one suggestion is for a rhyming-slang influenced flavour: ‘Landmine Raspberry Ripple.’

Another suggested flavour is influenced by the popular American geek movie Napoleon Dynamite. ‘Neapolitan Dynamite’, a chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream, will come with huge chunks of dynamite-shaped exploding candy that says ‘Made in China’ on it.

Other possible flavours include ‘Cookie D’ohfur!’ (to direct attention to Western screw-ups over Darfur), ‘Honeycaust’ (which would be one of the ice-cream company’s rare flirtations with honey flavouring – mmm!), and ‘Janja-seed Crunch’ (a lemon-based ice-cream peppered with poppy seeds and broken biscuits). There is, however, no truth to the suggestion that a ‘Chunky Monkey’-style flavour will be repackaged as ‘Chinky Monkey’ in the run-up to the Beijing Games; that is a ‘vicious rumour’, said an insider.

The ice-cream makers say the aim is to get Darfur-concerned citizens to do more than wear green wristbands for Darfur, drink Not Made In China tea for Darfur and stick bumper stickers on their Toyota Priuses for Darfur – ‘they need to be far more active and eat for Darfur’. One ice-cream fan says she will eat the new flavour ‘until the day China recognises the Dalai Lama as the spiritual ruler of Darfur’. ‘If everyone on the East Coast buys our new ice-cream and tucks into it with passion, think of the difference it will make’, said a spokesman. ‘It is hard to imagine the Janjaweed or the Chinese government surviving such an outbreak of politically-motivated spoon-licking in the West.’

Visit the Dream for Darfur website here.

(1) Changing the Rules of the Games, New York Times Magazine, 30 March 2008

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