Martha Stewart receives a wave of criticism for using ice from an iceberg to chill her cocktails

Martha Stewart, at the ‘Sports Illustrated’ 2023 Bathroom Issue Premiere at the Hard Rock Hotel in New York on May 18, 2023.Taylor Hill (WireImage)

Martha Stewart is the new enemy of environmental activists. The reason? The queen of the American lifestyle has decided, as if it were nothing, to use a piece of iceberg as ice cubes to cool her cocktails. And she has proudly displayed it to her nearly two million followers from her Instagram account. The businesswoman has been on vacation on a cruise through the icy waters between Iceland and Greenland, and she portrayed the best moments of the trip through a carousel of images that she has shared on this social network. In it he shares photos of her from her glacier excursions of her and her having glasses of champagne together with other tourists. The cause of the controversy has specifically been two images in which a smiling Stewart poses with a drink in her hand and then shows a large block of ice. She accompanies them with a message: “End of the first zodiac cruise from @swanhelleniccruises to a very beautiful fjord on the east coast of Greenland. In fact, we caught a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.”

Users on Instagram have not shared the joy seen in Stewart as he enjoys his drink, with many labeling his decision as “tacky” and irresponsible. “So while the climate warms due to the profits of a couple of thousand people, billionaires vacation in the melting icebergs, collect them and use them to keep their cocktails cold. “That sounds like a line from a dystopian novel,” laments one of the comments. Another accused her of being hypocritical: “Martha, I love you. But weren’t you recently talking about the effects of climate change in your own home? Melting icebergs for a cocktail surely won’t help. “I’m not even going to talk about the boat you’re in and how that can’t be good for climate change either.”

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Others, however, have come to his defense. “All these haters would rather Martha used water that came from that iceberg, bottled it, and then refrozen it in an electric freezer where she stored it for a few days,” says one user. In another comment, they go to great lengths to ensure that collecting ice is normal on these types of excursions: “The ice is already floating, not part of the ice mass, it is slowly melting in the ocean. Every tour company does it. We did it in Alaska and Patagonia. “They didn’t disturb the glaciers.” The debate is served in the comments of his publication, which already exceed more than a thousand when the rest of his publications often do not even reach a hundred.

Following the controversy, the company responsible for the cruise has announced that it will suspend the practice of bringing “small pieces of ice onto the ships” to be examined by passengers, as revealed to HuffPost. According to one of the representatives of the shipping company, through a statement sent this Wednesday to the digital media, the company never authorized “any invasive acquisition that does not fully respect the polar environment in accordance with our own strict rules and rigorous standards of the industry. In any case,” he adds, “we understand that this may seem insensitive to the climate crisis and we will therefore suspend this practice with immediate effect on all ships in the Swan Hellenic fleet.”

Stewart, for his part, has not responded to the criticism, but he has given a good summary of his trip. He has praised the food, the service, the accommodations and, above all, the opportunity to learn about Greenland’s Inuit culture. In her last post, this Wednesday, the businesswoman wrote, along with an image of her in front of a village: “Visiting a small Inuit village in Prince Christian Sound. About seventy people live here. The boats make stops at places like this where visitors can gain an understanding of local life, its challenges, its experiences, and its beauty. “We were invited to a lovely concert at the local church, met some of the families and visited the local artisans.” A message in which she does not hesitate to tag again the company organizing her adventure.

Thanks to her cooking shows, gardening magazines and interior decoration products, Martha Stewart became a household icon in the 1990s. But she has long been no stranger to controversy. In 2005, she was sentenced to five months in jail and six months under house arrest for obstruction of justice in a Wall Street insider trading case. Soon after, the entire business empire she had built, Living Omnimedia, began to collapse. In 2015, she was forced to sell the company, which had once been valued at $2 billion, for a fraction of what she went public with. She went from being part of the club of great fortunes in the US to not even having enough income to be on the list of the 50 richest self-made businesswomen, according to Forbes estimates.

Just as with her controversial Instagram posts, or her legal problems, Martha Stewart never ceases to surprise with her hobbies and tastes. An animal lover, the businesswoman has come to have a collection of 21 peacocks on one of her properties in New York—which she showed off in one of the episodes of the famous Kardashian sisters’ reality show. In a message on the social network

The nypost again “fake news”. They have a story on peacocks today and say I have sixteen on my farm I actually have 21 of these glorious birds whose house is impeccable. They do not smell. They are so clean! Their voices are loud but such fun to hear. They are so friendly

— Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart) May 16, 2021

Unfortunately, a tragedy happened in July 2022 when coyotes killed six of her peacocks. In an emotional post on Instagram, the Martha Stewart Living founder expressed her grief over the loss of two of her birds, Blue Boy and White Boy: “Rest in peace, Blue Boy. The coyotes came in broad daylight and devoured him and five others, including the magnificent White Boy.”

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