All I wanted was plain-vanilla chocolate

When I found cheap strawberries at the supermarket this week, I immediately knew that I wanted chocolate ice cream to go with them. It used to be you could just waltz up to the ice cream freezer and scoop a tub off the top of the pile, but now that we have rucola, fresh peaches and couscous in our supermarkets, it turns out that it's harder than you think to rustle up a tub of plain, simple, ungarnished chocolate ice cream.

I wasn't about to pay $14 for Haagen-Dazs. Ben & Jerry's (almost as expensive) doesn't do a pure chocolate. Working my way down the price chain and through the ice cream freezer to the very cheapest brands of Walls, Magnolia and Kings, I was still left empty-handed. There was Rocky Road, plenty of Neapolitan and many other concoctions that ran along the lines of chocolate-chip-superfudge-chunky-chocolate-with-cookie-dough. But no plain chocolate.

Not at Cold Storage, not at NTUC. Not even the Haagen-Dazs brand.

I eventually settled for Wall's triple chocolate. As a point of comparison, it was 1.5 times the size and less than half the price of a pint of Haagen-Dazs. Admittedly it's also described on the packaging as a "chocolate and malt-flavoured ice confection".