My most enjoyable ice experience occurred sometime in the 1980s.
On a hot day, my aunt made all the cousins get out of the pool for lunch. She passed out bologna-on-white-bread sandwiches, then dropped ice cubes into a line of waxy shell-pink plastic tumblers endemic to the ’80s, maybe only endemic to ’80s aunts. She poured Pepsi over the ice, and everything bubbled gently, ice cubes clinking. The cups, probably full of PFAS chemicals, gave the Pepsi a slight note of Barbie doll. Delicious.
The ice cubes wore down in the acid swirl of cola while my cousins and I dripped pool water into the grass and tried not to step on bees. We drank until only the ice was left. Having lost their sharp edges, the ice cubes were now milky white ovals with star-like fault lines. I bit down on the ice; it squeaked in the teeth and is probably responsible for some of my ever-growing dental bills. But I’d do it all over again. The skull-shaking crunch, the last bit of sweetness, and then dropping the plastic cups in the grass to heat in the sun before my aunt hollered at us to pick up after ourselves.
Buying Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes didn’t feel much like that.
There’s nothing fancy or remarkable about buying ten or even twenty pounds of ice from a gas station or a grocery chain. Maybe you’re having a party or filling a cooler, and you need more ice than you can crack out of two trays at home, so you drop a few bucks on ice. It doesn’t even feel that wasteful, though it does come in a plastic bag.
But Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes are ice cubes in a cardboard box, the kind that might house a cheesecake or a frozen pie. Inside the box are four (FOUR!) cubes in a plastic tray sealed with plastic film. It costs $4.99. That’s nearly $1.25 per cube. Nothing about this setup screams Aldi to me. Maybe Whole Foods could get away with it if each cube were hand-wrapped in tissue paper and the packaging included a treatise on where the water came from (Somewhere tropical. Or, alternatively: the Scottish Highlands) and how it would make you feel to sip a drink over this ice (Answer: rich).
This box looks utilitarian. The font doesn’t make me feel like I belong to a country club or drive a luxury SUV. There’s no mention of whiskey (or whisky). It’s just four oversized ice cubes in a box.
I pierce the film. I read the directions (yes, there are directions) and let the ice sit for the prescribed 3-4 minutes before using it.
Wanting to get the full experience, I pick up the cube and examine it. It’s perfectly square with sharp 90-degree angles. I lick it. It tastes … of nothing, which is what you want from ice. I worried it’d be too big to fit in any of my glasses, but this one sits nicely in a Crate & Barrel lowball glass I got for my wedding, which I didn’t invite my aunt to, due to greater family ructions.
I’m surprised how quickly the cube goes completely clear. Nothing like the ’80s Pepsi ice with its imperfections and infused air bubbles. This is clear clear. I pour a measure of lemonade over it, and the ice creates a window to the bottom of the glass. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before—a perfect aperture through the cloudy fluid.
I find myself staring into it. It’s … almost … beautiful? The contrast between the surrounding obscurity and the small, clear square that lets you see all the way through when everything around it is hazy and thick.
Online, fancy ice enthusiasts defend buying expensive ice, saying that making clear ice at home is too complicated. They detail methods that mechanically shake the bubbles out as it freezes. Boiling techniques to reduce gases and impurities. And specialized containers that force ice to freeze from the top down. It’s not something I’ve tried, or even considered trying. And my aunt definitely had no use for convoluted methods of freezing water just to make it clear. As long as it was cold, that was good enough.
My aunt died recently. We’d seen each other once in the ten years since my wedding. The beef wasn’t between us, but when family is fighting, everyone gets sprayed with eau de beef (probably the next product by the geniuses at Aldi).
I stare again into this melting shard of capitalism gone mad, this emblem of climate catastrophe and corporate foolishness. The ice is clear as a lens.
How did this wasteful ridiculousness get me to feel something? How did it create a peephole into a childhood with someone who loved me? Four ice cubes in two kinds of plastic packed into a box and shipped across states, maybe even countries (Aldi doesn’t list the origin on the packaging). It’s wasteful, and it’s killing us along with the planet. But humans are meaning-making machines, especially around loss, and apparently Pepsi and plastic tumblers are the madeleines I didn’t know I had till I picked up this box of Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes and started thinking about ice.
Anyway. $4.99 at Aldi. Treasure them before they’re gone.
