Frozen yogurt is how loneliness tastes. I should say I like it. I ate it frequently during the first summer of the pandemic, during that tentative period when it was okay to meet up with friends outside, provided you spread out on picnic blankets at a safe distance with masks and hand sanitizers at the ready. Still the volume on my social life was overall turned down very low. When I’d finished work and walked the dog, I’d often wander to Trader Joe’s and grab some Greek yogurt and frozen cherries to make Coconut Pinkcherry Yogurt from Smitten Kitchen, using the ice cream maker I’d gotten for my birthday.
Was it a little sad, standing in the kitchen of my little fourth-floor Brooklyn apartment in the evening, windows flung open so strains of electric guitar from the impromptu block parties hosted by the owner of a shuttered coffee shop across the street could be heard intermittently over the rattling plastic lid of the ice cream maker, weighted down by a hardcover copy of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian because I could never get the lid fastened on straight? Oh sure, sad yes, absolutely. But the frozen yogurt was thick and tart and slightly sweet, with enough protein that I could call it dinner. I’d sit on the couch and eat it from a bowl with curlicues of desert roses along the rim, the same pattern my grandmother once had, while my dog rested her chin on my knee.
“What’s a food that people think they enjoy but that’s also kind of a bummer?” Michael asks Janet in The Good Place, one of my favorite shows. He’s conducting a kind of grand psychological experiment, looking for a food that will unsettle people without their being able to articulate quite why. “Frozen yogurt,” Janet replies. Michael tastes it for himself. “It’s just okay,” he says. “Which means it’s perfect.”
But is frozen yogurt really just okay? Is it categorically worse than ice cream, a healthier alternative we trick ourselves into liking? I don’t believe in guilt-free food because I don’t think any food deserves to feel bad just for being itself. Also there’s an argument against eating anything and everything eventually. Some people think there’s too much sugar in grapes and that inflammation is caused by nightshades. Meanwhile we’re learning more about plant intelligence all the time — trees have friends and potted mimosas can learn to predict when you’ll drop them — and what guilt-free food will we have left then?
So for me the draw of frozen yogurt isn’t that it’s putatively better for you than ice cream. It’s just that frozen yogurt is smooth and light but substantial; it goes down easy when other things won’t. Dip a plastic spoon in and out of a cup full of frozen yogurt and note its satisfying weight. Lick a cone filled with it and your tongue carves a temporary nautilus.
The other time in my life when I ate a lot of frozen yogurt was my first year at Pomona College in southern California. My dorm was just a short walk to 21 Choices, a frozen yogurt shop that operated on the customized Coldstone Creamery model, featuring chilly slabs onto which workers would spread yogurt to be mixed with mango or pearls of mochi or chocolate chip cookie dough. This was before Instagram and TikTok and ASMR YouTube videos, so to watch the whole mesmerizing process you had to go in person.
Some people gravitated toward gummy bears as a mix-in, a choice I never understood. They grew rock-hard surrounded by froyo, lost their delicate chew. The flavor board always featured chocolate and vanilla, but the real draw was the rotating cast of Willy Wonka flavors — Circus Animal Cookie and Blueberry Cheesecake and Pumpkin Brownie Pie.
Early freshman year, when everyone traveled around campus in flocks of nine to 12, I would join the other people who lived on my floor on a pilgrimage to 21 Choices several times a week. Pomona sorted freshmen into sponsor groups, which were supposed to have some kind of connecting theme: here were the kids who played instruments and partied hard, there were the do-gooders, yonder the hippies. But our hall, while filled with generally nice and interesting people, couldn’t figure out what we had in common. We suspected we were a bunch of randos from the jump.
I’d known who I was in my arts high school and how to operate within its universe. My teachers and classmates had taught me to love Louise Glück and rivers and John Coltrane, that a good time with your friends meant romping around the woods on a wintry star-studded night in puffy jackets and impractical shoes, that the best way to dance was with your head down and all your limbs flailing around, so performatively un-self-conscious that you finally weren’t.
But the social world of Pomona was inscrutable to me, my sponsor group like The Breakfast Club but five times bigger and more nuanced and thus more confusing. I started off hanging out with a few girls who lived in my hall. They were fun and smart, but they didn’t have a favorite piece of classical music to cry to (my high school friends were partial to Vaughan Williams, Symphony Number 5) and they weren’t going to climb trees to get a better look at the moon. They were going to get a junior to buy them a bottle of Peach Schnapps and then go dance to Snoop in their going-out tops, as was the right of early-aughts freshmen women everywhere.
Did I like Snoop and Schnapps as well as contemporary poetry, or was it more of an either-or situation? Did these girls think I made sense among them? Did I? What I knew for sure was that I needed friends. Those frozen yogurt trips were a way that I could hang out with the broader, eclectic bunch of people in my sponsor group and try to figure out who else I might be able to bond with — a particularly important opportunity given that I was kind of scared of parties. (If someone offered me a beer bong… what was the etiquette?) If I managed to force myself to go out I’d often leave early and just wander the campus, breathing in the scent of star jasmine bushes, watching the shadows cast by palm trees lit up by security lights.
I liked that these froyo jaunts had a route and destination, a time when you could expect to be back. You weren’t locked into conversation partners the way you were at meal times. If banter started to stall with one person, you could slow your pace a bit to let the trio behind you catch up. Maybe the punk from Milwaukee could also be my friend. Maybe the guy who’d been in debate club, and the diver. Aha, there was a curly-haired artist!
I really did enjoy the frozen yogurt at 21 Choices, too. Especially Oreo Cookie Magic.
In the end, it took a while for me to figure college out. I went to study abroad in Prague my sophomore year in part because I was thinking of transferring and in part just as a way to escape. People say running away doesn’t fix your life, but spending a semester studying Czech and eating fried cheese and slipping down cobblestone streets in the middle of snowstorms kind of did.
It wasn’t so much that I found myself in Prague as that when I got back to Pomona, I wasn’t afraid of parties anymore, and I had proof it was possible to meet people who hadn’t lived within 30 feet of me when I was 18. I joined the literary magazine and began writing occasionally for the school paper and started chatting up whoever I happened to run into by the toaster in the cafeteria.
Meanwhile, I stayed friends with a lot of the people from the initial hodgepodge of my sponsor group. Freed from the confines of mandatory socializing by proximity, growing into ourselves, we got closer. My world opened up, and I didn’t take so many trips to get frozen yogurt. I didn’t need it anymore. Though even now, when I smell jasmine walking home at night, I remember: Loneliness isn’t the kind of problem you have to solve only just the once. You never know when you will.