Drinking Straw Day

What the day is

Drinking Straw Day is observed on January 3, the date in 1888 that Marvin Stone received a patent for the paper drinking straw.

Origin and background

Stone manufactured paper holders for cigarettes, which put the solution to hand. The straws in use at the time were actual rye grass stalks, which softened, split and lent drinks a grassy taste. He wound a strip of paper around a pencil, glued the seam, and then developed a paraffin coating so it would not turn to pulp in a cold drink. Within a few years the paper straw had displaced the vegetable one entirely.

The idea is far older than the patent. Among the oldest known drinking vessels are tubes used in Mesopotamia for beer, including elaborate ones of gold and lapis recovered from royal graves. The reason was practical rather than decorative: ancient beer carried grain husks and sediment, and drinking through a tube got beneath the floating layer.

The bendable straw came in the 1930s, when Joseph Friedman watched his young daughter struggling to reach a straight straw at a soda fountain, put a screw inside a paper tube and wound floss around the outside to press corrugations into it. The largest early market was not children but hospitals, because it let people drink lying down.

The modern argument over plastic straws deserves an honest account. By mass they are a very small share of ocean plastic, so bans are largely symbolic. The accessibility objection is not symbolic at all. Many disabled people need a flexible straw that bends, tolerates hot liquid, and cannot be bitten through dangerously, and paper, metal and glass each fail on at least one of those. Bans written without exemptions caused real harm to people who had no alternative.

How to take part

• Skip the straw when you do not need one, which is most of the time.
• Support keeping flexible straws available on request rather than removing them outright.
• Try a reusable straw and find out whether you will genuinely wash it.
• Look up the Mesopotamian drinking tubes, which are remarkable objects.
• Notice the corrugations next time you bend one. That was somebody's invention.