I guess we better not tell you about what reservoirs are used for.
I remember eating snow ice cream when I was a young lad in Minneapolis. I found it to be just okay, but my mother, who had grown up in the Depression, thought it was a special treat.
There was one episode of The Beverly Hillbillies when they were thinking of going back to Tennessee because they missed snow at Christmastime, so Drysdale (of course) secretly had artificial snow trucked in from a movie studio to keep them in California. In the end, he fessed up to Jed that the snow was just plastic (and the family was touched that he had gone to so much effort to make them happy), but by then Jethro had eaten several big bowls of snow ice cream. :smack:
In South Carolina we tried this with the rare sleet occasion and Mrs. Butterworths.
It did not work.
Grew up in New England, but never could bring myself to eat snow ice-cream, even when at friend’s house whose mom prepared.
I think I was freaked out by the warning from the late Frank Zappa:
- “Don’t eat the yellow snow,
'Cause that’s where the huskies go.”*
Real maple syrup and Mrs Butterworth’s don’t even belong in the same universe.
Somehow, I don’t think sleet would work under any circumstances either.
No, no!
“Watch out where the huskies go,
and don’t you eat that yellow snow”
But they aren’t eating the snow - they’re eating the maple candy that results. We’ve done this at our local maple sugar shack.
It needs to be syrup, so that the sugar level is high enough. It has to be boiled to the soft-ball or hard-ball stage.
I grew up in an area with a lot of lead pollution and was discouraged to some degree from eating mud, snow, etc.
I still ate snow as a kid, a little. I don’t find the idea disgusting at all.
I considered saying something like this.
Holy crap. I had no idea that was a Zappa lyrical quote. I just assumed it was a folk saying, as we had that in my neighborhood. Wonder who the Zappa fan was that the kids heard it from.
You know, your body is not some robot that’s totally separate from your environment. You are an animal, part of the Earth ecosystem. You have bacteria and dust in your lungs all the time that are breathed in. You have colonies of bacteria on your skin, and enough nematode worms living there that if you got transported somewhere and not the nematode worms, you would leave a nematode worm shadow. You have bacterial living in your gut that are necessary for your continued good health. You have mites living in your eyelashes. (The mites that live on human foreheads are said to have the highest populations among people who wash their faces several times a day … washing seems to be good for them.)
These are all conditions that apply to healthy human beings who wash themselves frequently. A little atmospheric dust in snow is not gonna hurt you absent atmospheric tests of atomic bombs, etc.
No kidding. Really? You don’t say.
Yeah, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that. I posted a factoid once on my fb wall (first part since disproved) - at birth we are 100% human. by adulthood 90% of the cells in our bodies belong to other microorganisms. You should have seen the yowling that ensued!
This is why I retreat to the SDMB.
My mother made snow cream when I was a kid. I loved it. It’s no worse than a snow cone.
I don’t think that’s how precipitation works…:dubious:
It’s partly true. Snowflakes (and sleet pellets, some of which melt into raindrops before they hit the ground) do in fact start nucleating on some solid particle, which can be a speck of dust or a bacterium. It’s a negligible fraction of the total flake/pellet/drop, though, and doesn’t result in any visible residue on the ground.
Snow cream sounds icky to me, only because I’m grossed out by condensed milk. On the rare occasions we got snow when I was a kid, Mom and Dad would help me gather some clean snow to make “fresh snow”-cones. Yummy!
Our dog enjoyed eating snow too…it was funny to watch her intently sniff a snow drift, gently nose at it, then finally decide it was clean enough to eat.
I was aware that people would use real snow for snow cones or similar, but not for full out “ice cream.” I never did it, not because I was grossed out by the concept itself, just not quite trusting the collection process and not liking being out in the snow enough to look for myself.
I guess when you get snow 6 months of the year you’re less inclined to think of it as a special treat worth eating.