Many years ago, when I was a kid, the local grocery store sold one-scoop ice cream cones for a nickel. It was traditional in my neighborhood to eat the cone down to the last one-half inch or so and then throw the end, filled with ice cream, away. The theory was that a spider might have fallen into the cone while it was in the box behind the counter and you shouldn’t take a chance on eating it. Then one day a smart-alec (not me) said “Suppose a woman in the factory making the cones lost a $10,000 diamond out of her wedding ring and it fell in the cone. If you don’t bite into that last little bit of cone, you will never know whether there is a diamond in it.” (Nobody asked why a worker in an ice cream cone factory would be wearing a $10,000 wedding ring to work.) We all realized that the chances of a diamond being in the end of the cone were much less than the chances of a spider being in there, but the happy result of finding a diamond is much greater than the unhappy result of eating a spider. In other words, there is a very slight chance of a huge gain versus a much more likely chance of eating a yucky spider. We argued all Summer about what we should do, evenly split between the two positions. We never resolved the issue. What would you do?
I would just eat the ice cream.
Big spider or little spider?
Eat the ice cream. How big a spider could it be? You’d probably never taste it.
Mmmmm, ice cream.
Forget the diamond, the payoff is the last half-inch of cone.
Eat it obviously
after finishing the bulb of ice cream that sits above the cone, bite a hole in the bottom of the cone and suck the rest of the ice cream out that way
(never thought about spiders or diamonds, because I could clearly see the cones were stored point up - nothing could nest in an upsidedown cone) if there was anything in the bottom of the cone, you’d know right away
What are you worried about? Any spider by that point is going to be dead!
I’m so glad we didn’t have this game as kids. We mostly just wondered if there was chocolate at the bottom.
But anyway, I vote for eat it and hope for a diamond.
Would you like flies with that?
Sorry
FML
Biting into a diamond would be unpleasant. So would biting into a spider. I’d squeeze the cone tip; it’s messy, but you’re not going to have neat hands after eating an ice-cream cone anyway. Mmmm… ice cream cone…
One of my greatest pleasures as a kid was eating the bottom of the cake style ice cream cone. I loved how that grid of ice cream cone filled up with semi melted ice cream and the way it would smoosh out in your mouth. I’m just glad there was no talk of spiders then.
The bottom of the cone is for the dog. (Unless it was chocolate.)
Ice cream cones should be eaten in their entirety without a second thought, the first thought being “mmmmm, ice cream”. Spiders, diamonds or severed fingers be damned.
I dunno about ice cream cones, but to this day I won’t eat the very bottom darker bit of a banana because as a kid I was told that spiders lay their eggs in it.
In case you were still wondering, that was the plug to keep melted ice cream from leaking out the bottom.
No opinion on the spider/diamond thing though.
But what if it were halloween and it was a diamond spider brooch?
Nobody who works in an ice cream factory can afford $10,000 diamonds.
We never had the spider/diamond story, but there was that thing about what “chocolate jimmies” really were.
Spider? So that’s where the 2 grams of protein listed on the nutrition label come from…
Of course I ate the bottom of the cone. The spider was always the best part.
I would just eat the ice cream.
Besides, what if the spider fell into the ice cream instead of the cone? By rigorously avoiding any possible spider contamination, you’d never eat any ice cream at all, which is no way to live.