CREAM: The delicious taste of novelty

CREAM’s opening this past weekend saw mountains of delicious ice cream, decadent cookies, and inhumanly long lines. Oh, the lines.

The opening of CREAM drew humongous crowds for many of the same reasons that it will become the popular ice cream sandwich place: mostly, it’s delicious and also cheap — the sweet spot that launches so many food venues around USC to success. And it also fills a previously untapped consumer market for ice cream cookie sandwiches — CREAM will become our Diddy Riese. And finally, there’s the element of novelty to grand openings that draws in scores of consumers and that creates the brand loyalty that CREAM will inevitably foster: it’s the newest form of deliciousness around campus.

The neuroscience behind novelty has been well-documented; research has proven that new experiences and ideas stimulate the brain to release dopamine, the pleasure-seeking pathway. But consider that, on a philosophical level, new things are just old things recycled — this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the concept of placing ice cream between cookies, or even the first CREAM. There can never be anything, then, that is truly new.

It’s a concept that stems most directly from determinism — the concept that all events are caused by a past event. It renders impossible spontaneity, and by extension, novelty.

A cynical person would deduce from this that novelty is a concept crafted by humans to create meaning in our lives. And perhaps the cynic would be correct. An obsession with the latest thing, be it ice cream or iPhones, makes us feel as though events are evolving. CREAM is great because it’s new, but it’s also great because it’s delicious. And at some point that ice cream was something else entirely. Maybe it’s rather beautiful that new things — new objects or new events — are reimaginings of old ones.

I could really use an ice cream sandwich.

*This article was not sponsored by CREAM, but I wish it were.

Sonali Seth is a freshman majoring in political science. Her column, “Sonacrates,” runs Tuesdays.