By Tatsuya King
Picture this,
After a long day of hanging out, you decide to wind down with some food at a local restaurant. Since it’s a hot day you decide to order a drink, let’s just say a sprite. You get your drink much earlier than your food so you decide to take a few sips. Mmmm, that’s delicious. You go in for another sip because the first sip was just so good, and this time, you feel the chill of the ice touching your upper lip as you angle the glass toward your mouth. Everything seems pretty great so far, but then you look at your glass and realize that half of the drink is already gone. Maybe you just took really large sips, that’s alright. You decide to keep drinking as normal, but maybe a little bit slower. If you finish this drink, you’re not going to buy another whole drink since it’s expensive, so it’s better to save the one you have. Once your food comes, your mind is taken off of the drink for a while. But soon you go for another sip. This time, the sweet taste hits you again, but, not for too long before the ice slides down the glass and hits your lip again. This sip got you noticeably less drink, and you put down the glass slightly less fulfilled than that first sip. But that’s alright, you still got about a third left. With each new sip, the amount of liquid entering your body gets smaller and smaller. With the large chunks of ice still in the cup, the liquid has a long journey between ice cubes before it can enter your gaping maw. You hold the cup in the air for longer and longer just to receive a fraction of the liquid you once enjoyed in excess. Soon, drinking becomes a struggle, a delicate balance of holding the glass at just the right angle so that no ice cubes tumble down your throat and choke you, but still angled enough for a few streams of sprite to trickle off the edge of the glass and onto your extended tongue. After a while, the ice begins to melt, refilling some of the glass and diluting the sprite. This makes it a little bit easier to drink, but the liquid you’re getting isn’t as scrumptious as before. And with time, the amount of actual sprite in the liquid dilutes so much so that it feels like you are only drinking water. Soon you are merely waiting for the ice to melt so that you can get another sip of what is essentially water. What a pitiful and tragic existence.
But that experience, that initial high of the refreshing sprite followed by an extended period of desperate grasping for refreshment, is exactly what restaurants and ice companies want.
In most restaurants and commercial kitchens, crescent ice is the go-to choice for its optimal bagging and storage qualities, as well as its use for keeping drinks cool over longer periods of time. Crescent ice is a type of clear ice that has a density of around 0.9167–0.9168 g/cm3 at 0 °C under standard conditions. Compared to water, which has a density of about 0.9998 g/cm3, clear ice is around 9% less dense, meaning that 5 pounds of ice will take up 9% more space than 5 pounds of water. This happens due to volumetric expansion, the phenomenon of water expanding in volume as it changes to a solid-state. In many restaurants, your glass will be filled to the top with ice before the drink is added. This means that a significant amount of your drink is essentially water, and water that takes up 9% more space at that. But what about keeping the drink cold? Of course, keeping your drink chill and refreshing is very important, but is it worth sacrificing a significant fraction of your drink for? Additionally, I propose the use of smaller amounts of crushed ice, that can be added to the drink at one’s leisure.
Knowledgable ice connoisseurs will know that the rate at which ice melts is dependent on temperature (obviously), and surface area. There are other ways to slow or quicken the melting rate of ice with flour or salt but none of those factors are important for this article. Since temperature will be the same inside the glass, the only factor that is important to understanding which type of ice will provide optimal melting characteristics is the surface area. Ice melts faster the more surface area that it has, as more of the ice is exposed to the warmer external environment. A spherical shape, then, will have the lowest surface area and will thus melt the slowest. Although crushed ice will likely have shapes that are more spherical than standard crescent ice, the fact that each piece is much smaller means that the overall surface area for an equivalent volume of ice will be higher. For those who want to keep their drink chilly, crescent ice does have some valuable qualities, but there are still major negatives that can be negated with only a little bit of change. With less crushed ice, you can get the same amount of chill while taking up less space. To keep your drink cold, all you would need to do is get more crushed iced whenever you need it.
All in all, it is pretty clear that the clear crescent ice used in most restaurants is a horrible blight on this modern world of innovation and positive change. Why then, do we stand for this atrocity? Why do restaurants keep using this inefficient ice? Because of capitalism. Yes, the answer to these questions is once again, capitalism. Silly old capitalism. The more ice a restaurant puts in your glass, the less actual drink they need to give you. When you finish your drink far before your food arrives, are you not tempted to buy another glass? That’s where they get you. Putting ice into your drink to make it all fancy but really it’s just a dubious ploy to rob you of a few more cents. So next time you go to a restaurant, ask for less ice, or ask for their manager and show them this article. Whatever you do next, I hope you carry forth a hatred of cubed ice equivalent to my own. Thank you.