Reese Witherspoon has defended eating snow she scraped off her car after her followers insisted it must be ‘filthy.’
The 47-year-old actress sent fans into a frenzy on Thursday when she she shared a TikTok making a winter-themed drink she called Snow Salt Chococinno using melted snow from outside.
Puzzled by the backlash, Reese took to the video sharing site again on Sunday as she explained: ‘There’s so many people on here saying snow is dirty so we went and took snow from the backyard and we microwaved it and it’s clear.’
Holding up the glass of clear melted snow for reference, she continued: ‘Is this bad? Am I not supposed to eat snow?’
Reece then referenced a comment that said fallen snow ‘was dirty but you only live once’ as she joked: ‘OK so we’re kind of in a category of “You only live once” and it snows maybe once a year here. I don’t know! Also, I want to say something. It was delicious! It was so good!’
She finally picked up on a comment that said eating fallen snow can make you sick as she insisted it was a generational issue.
Reece explained: ‘OK, talking about the snow not being filtered… I didn’t grow up drinking filtered water.”
#We drank out of the tap water. We actually put our mouths on the tap and then sometimes like in the summer, when it was hot, we drank out of the hose, like, we put our mouth on the hose, growing up.;
She then joked, Maybe that’s why I’m like this,’ adding, ‘So what you’re saying to me is I have to filter the snow before I eat it? I just can’t. Filtered snow. I don’t know how to do that.’
Reece’s original video saw her scrape the snow off her car with two mugs before topping it with salted caramel and chocolate syrup.
She explained: ‘We got a ton of snow over the past few days, so we decided to make a recipe.
‘First, we scooped the snow into cups and we added salted caramel syrup and some chocolate syrup because we like how they taste together.’
Reese then added some cold brew for a ‘yummy coffee flavour’ before digging in to her creation.
Eating spoonfuls of the snow, Reese proudly announced: ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so good,’ before titling it her ‘Snow Salt Chococinno.’
Yet fans didn’t seem to see the yummy side of the recipe, as they instead expressed their concerns over the star eating dirty snow.
One asked: ‘Isn’t snow dirty??’ while another suggested: ‘What if birds pooped in that snow’.
Someone else commented: ‘Snow is filthy. Yuck.’ and another chimed: ‘I love you but no thank you. Snow is sooo dirty full with bacteria.’
Another wrote: ‘I thought eating snow was like dangerous to our health,’ and another added: ‘its dirty its a fact….Rain isnt clean either…’
Another wrote: am I the only one concerned that she scooped it off of her car’ to which Reese herself replied: ‘It was the grill, but is that bad???’
Another then replied: ‘I was concerned for the cleanliness of it’.
While another added: ‘Fallen snow can be very dirty from the air and wind but who cares. You only live once. I remember eating snow as a kid’.
In an interview with Fox Weather back in February 2023, Dr Laura Martin, an assistant professor at the Ohio State University College of Medicine revealed whether snow really is safe to eat.
While it is well known that yellow snow is bad, Dr Martin revealed that freshly fallen snow is actually the least safe to eat because it can collect chemical contaminants from the air as it’s falling.
She also added that fallen snow that’s on the ground is also not safe to eat, because it can mix with potential toxins like dirt, animal waste, fertiliser, or pesticides, therefore the safest snow to consume are the top layers of fallen snow furthest away from the ground.
