A true blasphemy
When American Christian fundamentalists began objecting last week to fashionable Toronto ice cream parlour Sweet Jesus on the basis of its sacrilegious sobrequiet, calling loudly for a boycott and marshalling the socialmedia indignation of aggrieved believers worldwide to sign petitions and besiege the company with web fury, our news media swiftly took the story up with amused anthropological interest, patronizing the outraged niche as bored benighted yokels screaming at a harmless dessert.
But I actually think the Christians are onto something with their grievance. I agree, for instance, with the religious watchdog group that recently declared Sweet Jesus “crass” and “shameful,” and I too would like to join the ranks of spurning dissenters. But blasphemy isn’t the right point of contention. No, Sweet Jesus ought to be boycotted because it’s worthless ice cream cynically capitalizing on an idiotic trend.
When Sweet Jesus opened its first parlour on John Street between King and Adelaide downtown three years ago, the masses descended upon it with the fervour of a cultural phenomenon: lines snaked blocks-long around the clock, as prospective snackers gladly waited hours – real, actual hours, never to be regained in this finite too-brief lifetime – for a confection whose acquisition would be brandished and boasted about on social media to the envious favourites of the city’s less dedicated and patient. The sensible among us predicted that sooner or later the enthusiasm would settle down to reasonable levels, as people one by one learned the hard way that the ice cream at Sweet Jesus was merely bland soft serve of the calibre you’d find at McDonald’s and that the cones on which it was stacked were flavourless beige wafers bought in bulk for pennies. But it never happened.
Not only does Sweet Jesus continue to draw crowds of inexplicable density, it has engineered an expansion across the country and even into the United States. This trash is now a bona fide empire – a sprawling prosperous dump.
What’s the appeal? It isn’t difficult to apprehend: the ice cream at Sweet Jesus, cranked up and super-charged, is intended to be photographed rather than consumed. The gaudy, super-decorative style of the product lends itself ideally to Instagram, and the on-trend vision of youthful ebullience it affords the buyer, the aura it projects on its bearer of modish popularity, has made it stratospherically popular online. Locals still conspire to flatter themselves with a selfie in possession of these extravagant desserts: a picture of a snack from Sweet Jesus has for three years now been as much a fixture of life in Toronto for the aspirational as a shot of the Infinity Mirrors exhibit or the “Toronto” sign at City Hall. It’s merely one component more in a prefabricated aesthetic the impressionable can’t help but affect.
Please. We are better than these monstrosities.
You may have borne delighted witness to such staggering oddities as Sweet Jesus’s Lemon Coconut Cream Pie or Rocky Road Rage – colossal, face-dwarfing spires of mediocre soft-serve beleaguered by a cataract of candied debris. You may have been impressed, scrolling through your Instagram feed, by the Krusty the Cone – a farce of a dessert: glued to the sides of its already towering mess of syrup-smeared ice cream are sticky clumps of cotton candy, which is one is resigned to pick at clumsily while the ice cream proper melts unavoidably away. Perhaps you were awed by the ice cream that was rolled around in a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. ($7 for that, by the way.) Perhaps you were intrigued by the cone that looks like an edible abstract-expressionist painting or the Nazi’s face melting at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But these are not the desserts of diners with dignity. They’re for “influencers” who only want to snap a picture before tossing the cone in the trash.
So, let’s rally behind the fundamentalists on this one. They’re right: Sweet Jesus is profane.