Reducing the Use of Drinking Straws Will Be a Tough Sell

There’s a bill pending in the California legislature that would subject waiters to fines and imprisonment for giving diners plastic drinking straws without being asked.1517346262273 This legislation has no chance to pass -- I think -- but critics are having a lot of fun with it anyway. Held up to particular ridicule has been the claim that the U.S. consumes 500 million plastic straws a day, a figure that the news media have often cited. This data point, which would mean that Americans use something on the order of 182 billion straws a year, comes from a science project created by a 9-year-old boy in 2011. Thus the ridicule.

Okay, fair enough. Still, we do use a lot of them. And one cannot help but wonder how the straw became so ubiquitous. As it turns out, that took a lot of marketing. No one seems to have written a social history of the drinking straw. That’s too bad, because the social history turns out to be interesting.