[imagesource:twitter/marthatewart]

Martha Stewart cast a cool shadow on other influencers by posting a photograph that shows her using an actual chunk from an iceberg to chill her drink. As gangsta as that may be, Planet Instagram has been reacting as if she peed in a fjord.

Luxury’ or ‘designer’ ice is extremely hot right now, and everyone with a few followers on social media has been trying to come up with ever-increasingly bizarre ways to freeze water. How does one turn frozen cubes into artisanal ysblokkies? Nobody cares.

We just fill trays from the tap, but proponents of luxury ice say it’s the superior way to chill cocktails, boasting that it is individually carved, slow melting and has no minerals or chemicals that might affect how a drink tastes. Such an indulgence can cost R180 a pop.

It’s the final frontier of bespoke water.

As Instagram explores the cutting-edge of this new science, the OG influencer posted a picture of her enjoying a refreshing beverage chilled with ice chips from an actual iceberg. Not from the one that sank the Titanic, but still impressive enough to klap the frozen snotstrepies off all of the ice artists on the ‘gram. 

On Monday night, Stewart posted on Instagram a photo of herself in a winter hat and parka, showing off a beverage in a tumbler with the wilds of Greenland behind her. In the caption, she revealed that, while sailing aboard a Swan Hellenic cruise off Greenland’s east coast, they had “captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.”

Other photos showed still-intact glaciers with breakaways floating in the sea below and a pair of “captured” icebergs on a bar cart. OG all the way is our Martha.

 

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A post shared by Martha Stewart (@marthastewart48)

Whenever influencers get bested, they often resort to our love for pandas and polar caps as a spanking tool for the wealthy, so some of Martha’s 1.9 million followers chided her in the comments for being ‘elitist’ and ‘tone deaf’ – given that climate change has made Greenland the fastest-warming region in the world, where ice melts at twice the pace of Antarctica.

“Global warming and melting ice caps but we need glacier ice for cocktails?!”

“Using the remnants of a glacier sounds like a line from a dystopian novel.”

The ice-rage eventually sucked in a glaciologist, Eric Rignot, who is a professor in the Earth system science department at the University of California. According to him, it’s no big deal.

“It is not like she went to a glacier and carved a piece of ice off it,” Rignot wrote. “Icebergs float at sea already and slowly melt. Whether they melt in the ocean or in your glass does not make a difference.”

So it’s a meh from the real ice experts. Everyone should just chill.

Glaciologist Ian Allison, a professor at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, agreed, saying the environmental impact from the fossil fuels powering the cruise ship was far greater than that caused by Stewart putting some ice into her glass, which he described as “zero (or at least no greater than the beating of butterflies’ wings in the Amazon).”

People do love chipping away at the iceblock of ignorance, so this has now become a debate, which could be a good thing if attention was given to the location of the alleged environmental crime. Things aren’t cool at all in Greenland or any of the other freshwater resources on the planet. We should look into that.

 

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A post shared by Brian Kelly (@briankelly)

Even if Martha beat a polar bear to death with her Louis Vuitton handbag to get her Martini chilled, she’s still Martha F***** Stewart. Not even prison could stop her, so all this will blow over just like all the financial crimes stuff.

Ice ice baby.

[source:washingtonpost]