What can you do with snow to make the best of it?
From ANNE
BRAMLEY, NPR in ENN: Environmental News
Network
As
for me, I like to think of snow as food.
Growing
up in Missouri, I consumed as much snow ice cream as possible from
November to March. Each time the winter sky let loose, I caught a bowl of fresh
flakes. My grandmother mixed raw eggs, cream and sugar and poured it over top.
Snow
is one of the first "wild" foods small humans learn to forage. And
this time of year it's both free and plentiful to many.
But
is snow a magical, local and seasonal specialty, or is it an adventure in
extreme eating? As with many wild foods, it can be a bit of both.
I
asked Jeff S. Gaffney, a professor of chemistry at the University of
Arkansas, Little Rock, if we were to package snow and put it on grocery store
shelves, what would we have to put on the ingredient list?
You
can make snow cream with freshly fallen snow; milk, cream, or condensed milk;
sugar; and vanilla. You can make it even richer with whole raw eggs.
As
it falls through the sky, snow, with its intricate latticework, forms a sort of
net for catching pollutants that may be in the atmosphere. The most common is
black carbon, or soot, released by coal-fired plants and wood-burning stoves.
That's
why John Pomeroy, a researcher who studies water resources and climate
change at the University of Saskatchewan, suggests it's better to wait until a
few hours into the snowfall to gather your fresh catch. Snow acts like a kind
of atmospheric "scrubbing brush," he explains.
The longer the snow
falls, the lower the pollution levels in the air, and thus in the snow.
Read
more at NPR.
