Icicles should generally just be left alone by humans, neither eaten nor, really, approached at all. If you take a quick look at the image above, you can see why:Icicles are effectively giant spears, sharper at the bottom and heavier at the top, like an awl only writ large and made of frozen water. Should one fall on you, well ... while hard data is difficult to come by, there's no denying that people are killed or maimed by those things not infrequently, according to East Idaho News.
Eating them is an equally bad idea, according to IFL Science. Think about how they form (at least, in the environment in which you're most likely to encounter them). Water falls on the roof of a building, such as a house, rolls down to the edge, and then freezes. Well, what's on a roof? Bird poop, that's what. "Bird poop. A lot of it. And that water picks it up and freezes it in the ice. You're eating poop," said meteorologist Katie Nickolaou. The British government warns that exposure to contaminated bird droppings can cause psittacosis or salmonella. "A high price to pay for a lolly that tastes primarily of roof water," as IFL Science describes it.
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