A friend of mine asked me if I ever ate snow cream, and if it was safe? If you have never heard of it, snow cream is a mixture of fresh snow, milk, sugar, and cream. This “delicacy” is akin to making yourself a delicious Whiskey Sour and then letting someone dip their day-old smelly socks into your glass before you drink it.

Snow is nasty. It is filthy, unhealthy and frankly, a potential hazard to ingest. Stay away from it. Here is why.

Snowflakes are porous and they don’t fall to earth very fast. As they come down, every pollutant from factories, jet contrails, and God knows what else has plenty of time to jump on board with the snowflake. How about Legionella perhaps evaporating into the atmosphere and incorporating itself onto the flakes? Trust me, other than a few flakes on your tongue, don’t consume this crap.

I can hear it now, “but Tom, the cold kills bacteria”? Really? I’ll tell you what, let a rotted piece of meat stay in your freezer for a year. Thaw it, sample it for bacteria, then come back and talk to me about bacteria and cold.

DANGER ! EVIL AHEAD ! SNOW CREAM FOR SALE!

So, does that hold true for rain? Yes, but not as much, Drinking rainwater is still not a good idea, but it is far safer than “drinking snow”. First off, water has surface tension. This is why you can fill up a glass with water and actually have a bead form that is higher than the edge of the glass. Still, the water won’t run down the glass. This is also why water beads up and often can float a solid object that common sense tells you shouldn’t float. The surface tension actually blocks a lot of contaminants from penetrating raindrops. In addition, because rain falls to earth much faster than snow does, it doesn’t have as much of an opportunity to be polluted.

Snow cream sounds nasty, even without the snow. Have you ever tried this thing called ice cream? It even comes in flavors.