Quick: Chocolate or Vanilla?

Funny, everyone knows I'm referring to ice cream.  (I've quizzed with this question before, but you knew too, didn't you?)


It's a great ice breaker question. It's familiar, without being personal.  It's a choice we've all made at some point. Unless you get the soft ice-cream swirl blend of both from Carvel (or ye olde and goode Dixie cups). Or are lactose-intolerant. Or opt for the many more exotic flavors available. Like the flavor that one guy said should be called "Frozen Narcotics," but is really called "Moose-tracks": vanilla, with a streak of fudge running through it, and interspersed throughout, little peanut-butter cups. Or the other old-familiars, like mint-chocolate chip. Or Friendly's Butter Crunch.  Or Haagen Dazs' Rum Raisin.


I didn't used to make my own choice between chocolate and vanilla, however.  In a profound experience of peer pressure, as a pre-teen, I succumbed to the preferences of my sister and cousin: Chocolate.  Again and again.  A different kind of choice -- to follow the crowd, rather than be a minority of one.  Though I probably didn't think of it as making a choice.


I'm older now.  I have a backbone now (usually), and I can recognize the legitimacy of my own preferences.  Such that, in nearly all things, I'll choose chocolate. But in ice cream, between the two, really, vanilla.


And in chocolate chip cookies, both.