User:Demiurge1000/Death by ice cream

Death by ice cream refers to death caused by ice cream. There are variations to how one dies from it; the most common is the ice cream being poisoned.

Documented occurrences
In January 1892, a hotel worker in Chicago died after the huge amount of ice cream he ate "froze up his stomach". The Chicago Daily Tribune described his death cause as "queer".

In June 1898, Italian ice cream made with dirty water claimed the lives of three youths in London.

In May 1904, a seven-year-old boy in New York died from eating about half a litre of poisoned ice cream. The seller of the treat was arrested following his death.

In June 1910, consumption of contaminated ice cream caused a adolescent in Detroit, Michigan, to die of food poisoning. Similarly in June 1912, a young girl in Chicago died from having a bad ice cream cone.

In June 1917, a 20-year-old woman in Newark, New Jersey, had a combination of salmon and ice cream for dinner. This caused her food poisoning and she died soon afterwards.

In November 1938, a 34-year-old father in New York committed suicide with his 10-year-old son by adding poison to both of their ice cream.

In March 1942, prominent business magnate and Brotherhood of the Railway Trainmen member Hugh Edgar Sams, aged 68, died after eating ice cream. It was however not known if the confectionery truly caused his death.

In August 1984, a Baskin Robbins manager died after being assaulted by a looter and left to freeze in a freezer filled with ice cream.

In July 1986, a 51-year-old Floridian man died after consuming a tainted ice cream bar by Kraft Foods. Thereafter, production of the food item was halted and later on permanently stopped.

In September 1987, spolit batches of ice cream in Fujian, China, accounted for one fatality. In addition, it caused more than a thousand others to fall sick.

In August 2010, a 16-year-old teenager from Italy died after consuming gluten ice cream; he was a sufferer of Coeliac disease, a type of gluten intolerance. Shortly after his death, La Spiga, the seafood restaurant he and his family patronised demanded that the bill, which amounted to more than a thousand dollars, be paid. The boy's father expressed outrage at such a callous request, labelling it as "absurd, barbarous and cynical".

In popular culture
In his humour column for the British newspaper The Independent, journalist Miles Kington wrote about a fictitious museum called the National Ice Cream Death Museum, which recollects fatalities caused by ice cream. The online humour magazine, The Cynic, wrote in a 2008 entry about "Suicide by Ice Cream Sandwich", stating that numerous Americans kill themselves by "sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia" (excessively quick consumption of ice cream) on an annual basis.