For years, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's has been honoring musicians and famous late night hosts by naming ice cream flavors after them. His newest ice cream, Bernie's Yearning, is in honor of Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
"There has never been a candidate like Bernie Sanders. He is a presidential candidate that comes along once in a lifetime," Ben Cohen said on Boston Public Radio Tuesday.
Cohen has been traveling around the country in support of Sanders, telling audiences that Sanders is the only candidate who can bring a balance back to the economy. "He has refused to take any money from corporate interest and the super wealthy. He's funded by millions of individual donations representing an average of 27 dollars. What Bernie is saying is that, the system isn't broken, it's fixed. There is a reason why the top one percent of the population owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That is a statistic that blows my mind every time I say it."
It was this mind blowing statistic that gave Ben the idea for Bernie's Yearning. The flavor, which Cohen describes as "participatory," has a chocolate disc at the top of the pint. The other 90 percent of the ice cream is plain mint ice cream. "The huge disc of solid chocolate represents all the majority of the wealth created since the end of the recession that has gone to the top one percent and the mint ice cream is the rest of us, and the way you eat it is, you take your soup spoon and you whack that chocolate disc into a bunch of pieces, you mix it around and there you have it, Bernie's Yearning," said Cohen.
Cohen made 40 pints of Bernie's yearning in his kitchen under the Ben's best label, not Ben and Jerry's. The pints were then raffled off online instead of the original plan, which was to auction the pints to the highest bidders. "People pointed out that that would not be very Bernie like," Cohen said.
