Columbus, Ohio USA
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The Straw that Broke the Environment's Back
By Joel Knepp
September/October 2018 Issue
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Afri-Cola, the German equivalent of coke, once served its soda with actual natural straws, according to Joel Knepp.
© Courtesy Photo
If you haven’t heard by now, the Short North, the nation, and the world are drowning in plastic. Billions of tons of plastic are manufactured every year into a plethora of items both useful and useless. Do we need all this crap? Certainly not. Could we get by with a whole lot less of this substance which never goes away but only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that we end up unknowingly eating in tuna sandwiches? Oh yeah! Could we do without those flotsam mini-continents which drift around the oceans and harm sea life? Undoubtedly. Once upon a time, toys, furniture, TVs, and ski boots were made of wood, metal, glass, cloth, and leather, stuff which, when discarded, eventually becomes harmless dust, rust, and bug food. These days, vast numbers of these items are made from plastic, which neither rusts nor appeals to hungry bugs. Sadly, unless you are perhaps a remote jungle-dwelling tribal person, life without a whole lot of plastic is impossible. What to do?
A lot of attention has been focused lately on those pesky, ubiquitous plastic items known as straws. An increasing number of eating establishments and watering holes now act upon the notion that humans have lost the ability to hold a glass up to their lips and drink. I view this creeping “all straws all the time” trend as further evidence of the infantilization of America. It wasn’t always like this. In my youth, drinking straws in America were made of paper and mostly reserved for seriously ill or disabled people, little children (before the days of sippy cups), and folks enjoying semi-liquid ice-cream concoctions. As I recall, we were issued straws with our school-lunch milk cartons. While glugging from the spout of those little cartons was not all that difficult, the authorities might have thought it would encourage children to do the same with big containers from their home fridges; just a theory. This was in the good old days when you could shoot the Sweetheart brand straw wrappers across a lunchroom with a puff. Some might recall Flav-R-Straws, which came with a plug of flavoring inside which was infused into the liquid you sucked through them. They were supposedly designed to make drinking milk more pleasant for children. Even those wacky items, which fortunately didn’t last long, were made of paper.
Our language is full of straw references: the straw that broke the camel’s back, the last straw, the little pig that foolishly built his house of straw, the straw man, drawing the short straw. Were these phrases and terms about skinny plastic tubes?
No, these pre-plastic additions to our language referred to the real thing: actual straw, a biproduct of grain agriculture.
Not long ago in the big scheme of things, the vast majority of Americans worked on farms and had first-hand experience with straw. We even grew wheat and rye here in the Buckeye State in days of yore before most of our farmland was dedicated to corn and soybeans Most of the food folks ate was locally sourced, likely grown by them or their neighbors. Yes, they were quite hip back then, but probably didn’t know it.
A big food item then as now was bread, gluten and all. While many if not most Americans have never been in a wheat or rye field, those of us who have know that the grain that gets ground into flour and made into Twinkies and Rye Krisp grows on stalks which when harvested become straw. So now you know where the so-called straw through which you sip your weirdly colored Slurpee got its name. The original drinking straw was the dried hollow stalk of grain now employed to (1) cover up newly planted grass seed, (2) line horse stalls, and (3) sit on while performing corny country music.Of course, using actual wheat or rye straw to imbibe modern beverages like Red Bull, Powerade, and Long Island Ice Tea would be way too primitive, unsanitary, something unimaginable in modern times, right? Wrong. As an Army brat in Germany in the 1960s, which some might consider the far edge of modern times, I made occasional off-base forays to local swimming pools, restaurants, and corner stores. Like most kids in those days before sugar was evil, I was a soda-pop freak. On those jaunts I often managed to satisfy my jones with Afri-Cola, the German equivalent of Coke. Shopkeepers would sell it in a small, returnable bottle in which they placed – brace yourself – a real straw. It was merely a piece of hollow grain stalk which required some minor processing but no advanced chemistry, energy-intensive manufacturing, or wrapping. Those puppies worked just fine and probably biodegraded in a few weeks once discarded. Real straw – what a concept! Love those Germans. In a possibly fractured version of the language of young caffeine-drink guzzlers, “Totes awesome, no, epic!”
Back here in the present day, the anti-straw movement is on a roll. Modern industry is frantically working to come up with various new high-input biodegradable substances to replace our environmentally unconscious plastic sip aides. Value-added “natural & organic” straws that cost a quarter apiece made of goop formulated in a lab and extruded by robots? Why not? I suspect that Elon Musk already has a team working on it. Some pricey restaurants are even issuing glass or stainless-steel models. Cities and countries all over the world are either banning plastic straws or talking about it. In the U.S., most of the action so far is on the always-more-progressive West Coast. Here in Buckeyeland, I wouldn’t be surprised if bumper stickers started showing up on pickup trucks declaring, “I’ll give you my plastic straw when you pry it from my cold dead hands.” But back to the point, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Ikea are now beginning to get onboard, as is the U.K. version of Burger King.
Even the much-loved Queen Elizabeth II has set an example for the royals of the world by banning the offending straws from her palaces. Though I can’t imagine the old girl ever drinking through a straw of any material, I still say “You go, Liz!” I might also add, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen, the Anti-plastic Regime!” Speaking of royals, or more accurately royal wannabes, will the Trump White House, Mar-a-Lago, and his golf-course 19th holes be next? Doubtful, although Mr. President is nothing if not surprising. So far, I have heard no rumblings about banning plastic straws in Columbus, but I don’t get around much anymore. Next to affordable housing, infant mortality, and potholes, I doubt if this stands as a priority for Mayor Ginther. Here in the fabulous Short North, a few weeks back I was served a cocktail at Forno’s, that classy but not snooty establishment at Buttles and High. My drink was served with one of those little tubular plastic miscreants, but the beverage was so tasty I just couldn’t bring myself to harass the bartender.
Whatever your take on the snowballing plastic straw hubbub, keep in mind that sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. Contrary to popular belief, we humans can be retrained to drink from the rim of glasses, so we really don’t need to have a straw all the time. Save money, cut out the middleman! Promote glass-to-mouth resuscitation! When we do use a straw, rather than making it out of plastic, some other questionable substance, or even paper, why not return to the original?
So cheers to your health and that of the sea turtles, and here’s to plastic-free drinking! Next, I’m going after those lawn chairs.
In Uganda, discarded plastic straws are collected from beer and soft drink depots, cleaned, and woven into mats for picnics and prayers or joined to form bags; a great idea, but I don’t think it’ll fly here. Wait, I’ve got it! We can collect all our used plastic straws and ship them to Uganda!
Joel Knepp lives in Victorian Village with his wife Lynda McClanahan, an artist.
They performed as the musical duo Nick & Polina for many years in the area.© 2018 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.
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