Is it Safe to Eat Snow?
Well it happened. The first snowfall of THE SEASON. As we nestle into our new home in Ontario, we must face the fact that winter Tis the season more often than Tis not. Ditto for the white stuff, which will soon become brown stuff as everyone likes to remind me.
Though my husband and I have little use for snow (a White Christmas Day would suffice) our kids are excited to have a new use for their sand toys. The other day as I stepped away from the window to grab the camera and prove to my friends in the west that we are in fact nuts, my daughter scooped up a generous helping of snow and licked her mittens right down to the wool. I laughed and told her to stick her tongue out to catch some flakes, knowing her little brother would watch and do the same. But, as I snapped the photo the green meanie suddenly came over me…Is it safe for kids to eat snow?
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We all know that the old line, “well we did it and we all turned out fine” is hardly true. Just as the times have changed, so has the snow. According to Helen Suh Macintosh, an environmental professor at Harvard, falling snow attracts toxins quite easily. In a report on Treehugger, Macintosh suggests that if you’re living anywhere near a city you can assume your snow is doing its fair share of collecting:
Snow is formed by water vapor that moves in clouds in cold air. As the water vapor moves in the cold air, it can stick to a tiny piece of dust and then have other water molecules attach to it, forming a crystal. Once formed, the crystal can continue to grow and can stay in the air for hours before it falls to the ground. It is during this time that the snow crystal can collect or “scavenge” pollutants that are present in the air.
In other words, don’t let the pureness factor of the white stuff fool you. But even if we know better, does that mean we’re going to stop our kids from their usual sampling, even if we could. As one mom on www.mothering.com said, “short of putting a space helmet on” the kids there is no stopping them. Last winter the International Herald Tribune investigated this very concern. In its conclusion, Dr. Lynnette Mazur, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical School had this advice for parents: “Licking a little snow off a glove is probably OK…A meal of snow is not.” That sounds like a fair compromise, though I don’t know if my four year old will agree.
Do you let your kids eat snow?
Funny, my kids love to eat snow. I tell them that it might have bird pee on it and that stops them.
oo..that might work, at least with the older one.
Great post! We used to make ice cream from snow when I was a kid in Ohio.
I used to eat snow in big chunks when I lived in MI but we live in FL and we have just an equal concern of our daughter eating the sand but we’ll see how she is when we go to see snow for the first time this winter. I’m glad I came across this post!
Yes, young children do love to taste test the sand, don’t they? At least it’s usually only once or twice before they learn that there is a better use for it. I’m assuming snow still tastes good these days, even if it’s not good for them.
Okay. I just learned the hard way (or rather my children did) that it’s not advisable to eat snow. We’re in Quebec City, though I’m originally from southern California and my sometimes nanny, Alice, is from Panama (snow is not the norm in either place!). Well Alice had my 3.5 yr old daughter and my 20-month son out in the snow. After my son tired and came inside I was watching my daughter voraciously licking snowballs that Alice was making her. I wondered if I should call down to stop the snow eating. Well, 6 hours later both of them were throwing up–my daughter much more than my son who just had a couple of bites of the fluffy white stuff. My French Canadian infectious disease specialist husband chided us as being amateurs in the snow department–of course we’re not supposed to let them eat a lot of snow and especially not at the beginning of the season! It probably won’t be hard to keep the poor little angels from eating snow anymore!
Great story! Thanks for sharing. I grew up in Montreal and ate my fair share of snow as a kid.
hmmm….i don’t have kids, but my dogs LOVE to eat the snow…i wonder what they effects are for dogs.
My kids are making snow cones (real ones) so we decided to look it up. Too bad. Like anything else, in small quantities, not as harmful. But, no more snow cones for us. O’Momma site says pesticides travel a very long way, some outlawed in USA make it up here.
[...] As for the risks of ingesting airborne chemicals and pollutants when you eat snow, that answer is a little trickier. That’s why we’re going to defer to the experts. [...]