Ice cream: the facts

1) Ice cream might best be enjoyed outside on a hot day – but 63% of Brits eat theirs on their own sofa. What’s more, one in five eat it straight from the tub! 2) Vanilla or strawberry? Neither. Chocolate ice cream topped with nuts and chocolate sauce and packed with chocolate chunks is the country’s favourite ice cream, according to a poll. 3) We love our ice cream – but not as much as the USA. The average Brit eats four kilograms of ice cream annually, but every year Americans lick their way through 26kg each. 4) Take it slowly. An ice cream headache – also known as brain freeze – happens when ice cream touches the roof of your mouth, causing blood vessels in the brain to dilate. 5) No one’s sure when ice cream was invented but Alexander the Great (365BC-323BC) enjoyed snow and ice flavoured with nectar and honey. 6) Around 3.3 billion gallons of ice cream are consumed around the globe every year. That’s enough to fill 5000 Olympic swimming pools. 7) In Venezuela, there’s an ice cream shop which has more than 900 flavours, including trout, mushrooms in wine and hot dog. We’ll stick with strawberry, thanks. 8) The first ice cream that comes closes to resembling modern day ice cream was found in the first century in China. It used a mixture of cow, horse, water buffalo and goat milk. 9) The largest cone was created in 2012 in Rimini, Italy. It was nine feet tall and covered with a 700kg white chocolate cone, then decorated with 2000 wafer biscuits. 10) In 2005, a Lancashire dairy, Dowson’s in Blackburn, produced a special black pudding flavoured ice cream.