Breaking the camel's back

When N-son was with his dad at the auto show, they stopped to get food at a place called a "restaurant".  (I've been to these places occasionally myself!)   N-son sent me a photo of his drink, which he knew I'd get a kind of a kick out of, because his soda was served in . . . . 

. . . a canning jar! 

This is very funny; I imagine a bunch of women standing around a hot stove in a humid August, the heat of summer not yet waning, putting up Coca-cola for the cold winter months ahead.  And lo, the months pass and finally this February, as the customers file into the dining area, Mildred heads down into the basement and brings up a quart jar she'd "put up" and then saved, to serve to my son.  It's good to see these old homesteader traditions live on . . .

Well, actually, that's not what I thought when I saw this photo.  I giggled at the canning jar, and I immediately texted back, "GIVE BACK THE STRAW!!! (but cool canning jar)."   So my son knew it was really still me.

So let me just say, in case this wasn't already super obvious about me, that I think that a plastic drinking straw is one of the most pointlessly destructive objects on the planet.    It's not that straws themselves are more destructive than, say, plastic magazine wrappers or even plastic water bottles.  But straws seem to really be trash for the sake of making trash.

A plastic straw that a person uses once (or doesn't use, but discards anyway) takes over 200 years to break down into whatever mysterious concoction it is that plastic breaks down into. 200 years is more than 6 billion seconds.   Saying "no straw, please" takes about 2.5 seconds.  Think of the time savings that straw-avoidance gives you!

Not to mention,  avoiding straws can be both fun and funny.  Some anti-straw campaigns play it straight, like this lovely National Geographic essay, which notes that

Small and lightweight, straws often never make it into recycling bins; the evidence of this failure is clearly visible on any beach. And although straws amount to a tiny fraction of ocean plastic, their size makes them one of the most insidious polluters because they entangle marine animals and are consumed by fish. Video of scientists removing a straw embedded in a sea turtle’s nose went viral in 2015.

But other places have a more humorous approach, like the organization that calls themselves "https://thelastplasticstraw.org/".   (Get it?  the last straw?)  Or the OneMillionWomen site, which has an essay with the cute title "Straws: Why they seriously suck".  The Washington Post reports that "A campaign to eliminate plastic straws is sucking in thousands of converts".

Bamboo straws
(in a canning jar, of course).

More and more localities have decided to ban straws.  (How does a community decide to do this?  Maybe they have a straw poll!)  More and more customers are deciding that our marine wildlife suffers by drawing the short straw.   Almost all of us possess the ability to drink out of a glass (or even a trendy canning jar) without tubular assistance; the argument that plastic tubes enhance the drinking experience is a straw man.

If you're going to go grasping at straws, of course, there are non-plastic alternatives.  Our family owns a fine set of bamboo straws that my sister gave me last year for Christmas. We use these at our "No Hands Dinner" (it's hard to drink out of a cup if you're not allowed to use your hands).  We wash and reuse these, and if we ever do discard them, we can compost them.

When N-son got home from the auto show, he told me that of course he gave the straw back to his server.  Good man.  In fact, you might even say he's ex-straw-dinary.