The Astonishing Record For Most Ice Cream Eaten In A Minute
Ice cream is among the best achievements of human gastronomy. Each chilled, rich scoop of ice cream tickles the taste buds in a way that's difficult to adequately describe. Therein lies the problem. One scoop inevitably leads to another, and soon, your ice cream dish is rather large.
Ice cream confectioners, playing off of our collective love of stacking scoops, are always striving to make the biggest, most over-the-top sundae imaginable. At some brick-and-mortar Ben & Jerry's locations, you can order the Vermonster bucket, a 20-scoop monstrosity jam-packed with toppings. Cabot's, an ice cream parlor in Massachusetts, sells The Great Pyramid, an egregious, Egyptian-inspired heap of over 60 pints that you are supposed to share with 175 of your closest friends.
However, it's possible that no figure in the vast, delicious world of this frozen dessert is as astonishing as the record time for the most ice cream eaten in a single minute.
Isaac Harding-Davis, destroyer of dairy dessert
According to National Today, National Ice Cream Day is celebrated every year on the third Sunday of July, a tradition started by President Reagan in the '80s — this year, that's July 16th. Your local ice cream parlor might offer free ice cream that day.
Incidentally, National Ice Cream Day fell on the same day in 2017, which prompted Australian competitive eater Isaac Harding-Davis' world record attempt. In an appearance on the Sydney-based program "Channel Nine Today," Isaac Harding-Davis set the record for the most ice cream eaten within a single minute, per Guinness World Records. While the host of the news program, Brenton Ragless, could only manage a couple of mouthfuls during the allotted time, Harding-Davis wolfed down a whopping 1-pound, 12-ounce, or 806 gram, serving of Ben & Jerry's. While many of us have put away a personal pint of Ben & Jerry's on a lonely evening, he was able to eat around two pints in just 60 seconds, all while braving a brain freeze.
Harding-Davis' competitive eating career
For his record attempt, Harding-Davis didn't choose to eat any of the most popular ice cream flavors. According to Guinness World Records, he went with Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream. When you're eating two pints of ice cream in a minute, it's probably better if you enjoy the flavor, but this seems like a somewhat odd choice. The official Ben & Jerry's website tells us that the company's Strawberry Cheesecake offering is packed with chunks of chewy cheesecake and brought together with a graham cracker swirl, which one can imagine may be difficult to extricate from the pint container in a competitive eating setting.
Harding-Davis' competitive eating accomplishments aren't limited to the realm of frozen desserts. In 2014, an 18-year-old Harding-Davis set a record at a hot dog joint for eating a two-foot-long wiener in the fastest time, via Daily Mail. Several years later, he posted a video on his YouTube channel wherein he scarfed down 100 chicken nuggets in a record-breaking four minutes and 44 seconds. The Maitland Mercury tells us that in 2017, Harding-Davis only took three and a half minutes to eat more than two pounds of schnitzel.