So far 2024 has been a pretty cold and snowy one, with large chunks of the country experiencing deep winter weather. But you know what they say about life giving you lemons: you make lemonade. Something similar, apparently, goes for snow — at least if you’re Reese Witherspoon, who had to push back against detractors after she shared a possibly dodgy recipe that involves eating the preciptiation.
Per HuffPost, on Friday the Oscar-winning actress took to TikTok to share a recipe for what she called “snow salt chococcino.” What on earth is that? It involves scooping up a big heaping pile of snow into mugs, flavoring it with chocolate syrup, caramel sauce, and cold-brew coffee. Witherspoon dubbed the concoction “so good.”
Others, however, were alarmed. People in the comments pointed out that maybe it’s not healthy to eat raw precipitation. She and her family could catch some disease, couldn’t they? Witherspoon, who’s had to fend off criticism of her lifestyle choices before, remained adamant that “snow salt chococcino” was perfectly fine.
“We microwaved it and it’s clear,” she said in another video, appearing a bit taken aback by the criticism. “Is this bad? Am I not supposed to eat snow?”
In yet another video, she was even more defensive, saying, “We’re kind of in the category of, like, you only live once, and it snows maybe once a year here.”
So is it safe to eat snow? NPR did an investigation into the matter back in 2022, and the answer was yeah, sort of. Staci Simonich, a professor of environmental and toxic ecology at Oregon State University, said she “would not hesitate” to let her kids chow down on snow. She said that, while snow can accumulate contaminants, like pesticide, those “concentrations are low and the amount of snow eaten in a handful is small, so the one-time dose is very low and not a risk to health.”
In another look into the issue — there are more reports on the safety of eating snow than you’d perhaps assume — pediatrician Dr. Laura Martin said “probably not all snow” is safe, advising sticking with the “whitest, fluffiest top layer of fallen snow, furthest away from the ground.”
For the record, Witherspoon seems to have mostly scooped up that fluffy stuff at the top, not the probably more contaminated stuff towards the surface. Besides, surely many grew up eating snow on snow days, and everyone turned out fine, right? Right??
(Via HuffPost)