This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and watch out for more Battle of the Brands posts.

If you like ice cream, you're probably already in one camp or the other. Few people claim to love Ben & Jerry's peacenik-y, tied-up-and-twisted flavors equally as well as the upper-crust uber-richness of Haagen-Dazs' highly-crafted premium varieties.

Oddly, though both have such strong brand identity and have created corporate cultures that seem pure and fiercely independent, both are tiny units of much larger (and unsexy) food companies. Ben & Jerry's was acquired by Unilever plc (ADR) (NYSE: UL) in 2000, while Haagen-Dazs was acquired by Pillsbury in 1983, now a unit of the quite pedantic General Mills, Inc. (NYSE: GIS).

How is it that two ice cream companies that share so many similarities -- the same size and shape package, the same commitment to quality of ingredients, the same fierce attention to (and careful culling of) flavor rosters, the same expectations (that you'll eat a good portion of the pint in one sitting, probably alone), the same prices -- be so different? To an outsider who understood nothing of the singular pleasure of dipping a spoon into a fresh-from-the-freezer pint of a favorite flavor, well, you'd think the brands were interchangeable; that a given consumer would choose one over the other based only on the weekly specials at one's neighborhood grocery store. Au contraire, or as they say in Vermont, no way man.

Right this moment (I imagine), a flavor expert somewhere deep in the Vermont offices of Unilever ADR (NYSE:UL) unit Ben & Jerry's is asking a very, very difficult question: What does a celebrity taste like? And which celebrities do we even want to associate with vanilla ice cream, raspberry swirl and brownie bits (that would be Dave Matthews) or fudge-covered waffle cone pieces, ripples of caramel, and the patriotic vanilla ice cream (yep, Stephen Colbert).

BloggingStocks may be the only organization brave enough to wonder, should Jerry Garcia really taste like cherries and fudge? and which celebrities are the ice-creamiest? Does anyone buy the ice cream just because they like the celebrity, and, isn't that a bit weird? Do you want to taste the people you most admire? And is this all a liberal hippy conspiracy to keep ice cream Democratic?

Let's begin by exploring where this whole celebrity-ice cream flavor thing started: Jerry Garcia. He and his band the Grateful Dead, well, let's just say that may have been where the term "groupie" started. People who love the Grateful Dead, they love the Grateful Dead. Oh, my, lord. So for the liberal (and then independent) company to name a flavor after the hippiest of all hippy icons, well, totally made sense. Are you familiar with the history of celebrities and ice cream? If you do, you know that Cherry Garcia was the first ice cream ever named for a rock star, and appeared in 1987 at the suggestion of two deadheads from Portland, Maine.

Because I'm very serious about my work, I sent my husband out in the dark of night for a quart of Cherry Garcia, the flavor that started it all, and the number one flavor on Ben & Jerry's flavor roster. Cherries and "fudge flakes" (which seem very much like "pieces of chocolate" to me, but I'm not the one describing the flavors on the package) are mixed into cherry ice cream. Does Cherry Garcia deserve its place on the top of the roster? And is it because of the taste of the ice cream, or the connection with the band?