A history of… drinking straws
For most of the 19th century they really sucked…
I’d like to start with a quick shout-out to my friend Julie Danger who suggested that I write about the history of drinking straws. It has been a truly fascinating investigation! I mentioned in my piece about shampoo about how astonishing it can be to discover quite how recent some objects and practices are. Conversely it is equally amazing to find out just how old some things are – and drinking straws fall firmly into that latter category.
We know that humans have been using drinking straws for at least 6,000 years and that their earliest recorded use is, somewhat surprisingly, inexorably linked to the consumption of beer.
The Sumarian civilisation left behind (among many other things) thousands of clay cylindrical seals which when rolled out onto a surface of flat, wet clay would render a scene. It is from just such a seal, dating from around 3,850 BC that we see the first visual representation of straw use. Groups of people sitting around drinking from large pots via (to our modern-day eyes) exceptionally long straws! We know from other archeological evidence that pots such as these contained a form of beer, but why did people use straws, rather than filling up cups and sipping from them?
Well, this beer wasn’t the clear, crisp, drink that we are familiar with today. The pots being drunk from were the same ones in which the brew was fermented. As a result there would have been a thick yeasty scum on the surface of the liquid which would have been disgusting to drink. By using a straw one would have been able to circumvent that mess and get to clearer liquid underneath, but even this would still have had bits of barley and yeast and sediment floating around in it. To avoid this getting sucked up the end of the straw would have been blocked and the tip pierced by numerous small holes, turning it into a filter. In this respect it would have acted in much the same way as bombillas, the silver straws that have been used to drink mate tea in South America for hundreds of years.
For most Sumerians straws would have been simple hollow reeds, with a kink in them so that one could sip comfortably from one’s seat. For royalty, however, they were exquisite works of craftsmanship. In the tomb of Queen Puabi of Ur a magnificent straw, more than 4,500 years old, was discovered. Made from a copper tube strung with gold and lapis lazuli beads it is 1.2 metres (four feet) long! The length of Sumarian straws was likely required in part by the size of the pots being drunk from, but also had a social aspect. The longer the straws, the more people (as shown on the seal) could sit around the same pot having a convivial drink.
The ancient use of straws was not limited to the Sumerians as shown by the oldest surviving examples, dating back 5,500 years, which were unearthed in the northern Caucasus in Russia in 1897. Like the Sumarian straws these were also long, and had narrow, perforated, tips suggesting that these too were used for the drinking of beer.
The Egyptians too were using straws to drink beer thousands of years ago, as this picture from 1,300 BC shows:
There seems to have been little staw use in Europe during the middle ages, but there were circumstances in which they could be useful. The 1554 Spanish novella La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidade (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities) is a picaresque satire recounting the adventures of the boy Lázaro as he uses his cunning to exploit his various masters (somewhat like Tom Sawyer more than 300 years later). His first boss is a blind beggar who was unwilling to share his wine with his servant, so Lázaro contrives to obtain some using a straw:1
He used to put down a jug of wine next to him when we ate, and I very quickly grabbed it and gave it a couple of quiet kisses and returned it to its place. But this didn’t last long, because he noticed the lack of drink, and to keep his wine safe he never abandoned the jug afterward, before he held it by the handle; but there was no lodestone more attracted to iron than I was to wine, so I took a long rye straw, that I had made for this need, which I put into the mouth of the jug, sucking the wine and leaving it empty.
Sadly for Lázaro this trick didn’t work for long, and he had to come up with a new plan:
But since the traitor was so clever, I think he sensed me, and from then on he changed his approach, and placed his jug between his legs, and covered it with his hand, and thus drank safely. Since I was addicted to wine, I was dying for it, and seeing that that straw remedy was of no use or value to me, I decided to make a subtle hole in the bottom of the jar, and delicately cover it with a very thin wax tortilla. At meal time, pretending to be cold, I would get between the legs of the sad blind man to warm myself in the poor little fire we had, and in the heat of it, after the wax had melted, because it was very little, the wine flowed into my mouth, so that not a drop was lost. When the poor man went to drink, he found nothing. Terrified, he cursed the jug and the wine to the devil, having no idea what could have happened.
The use of rye grass as straws really became popular in 19th-century America. The main driver for this was the creation of cocktails that contained ice. Then, as now, sipping a drink that contains ice cubes can be a less than ideal scenario, as the cubes bump up against one’s lips and the full mix of the drink is not enjoyed. The solution was to take the hollow stems of rye grass, cut them, dry them and pop these straws into a drink. Yup, the reason that straws are called straws is because people used to suck up booze through pieces of straw!
Charles Dickens was not hugely enamoured with America upon his first visit, but he did take a shine to cocktails, and the drinking of them through straws, as this passage from Martin Chuzzlewit shows:
Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop… “This wonderful invention, sir,” said Mark [the bartender], tenderly patting the empty glass, “is called a cobbler. Sherry Cobbler when you name it long; cobbler, when you name it short.”
There were, however, a number of problems with using rye straws. The first was that they were rather narrow, so to be able to consume one’s drink effectively often two had to be used in each drink (there is still the affectation in some ‘fancier’ cocktail bars of serving a drink with two short, slender straws in a throwback to this practice.)2 More troublingly these straws would tend to collapse into mush pretty swiftly after being put into a drink and worse they imparted a distinctly grassy flavour to any drink that was consumed through them.
This is where one Marvin Chester Stone enters the story. Drinking a mint julep in his local bar one evening he became so annoyed at the bits of rye fibre he was sucking up with his delicious beverage that he decided to do something about it. It just so happened that he ran a successful business manufacturing paper cigarette holders and so was no stranger to making tubes for people to suck through. He took a pencil, wrapped a strip of paper around it, glued it, removed the pencil and created a wholly new straw. It took a little bit of experimentation with wax coating to make something that wouldn’t get soggy and become useless, but in 1888 he received the patent for the paper straw that we know today. His new business was a wild success, selling two million straws each day at its peak. The adverts for these straws made reference both to the health benefits of using paper straws (as they couldn’t unhygienically reused) and their superiority over their rye competitors:
Straws entirely free from Taste or Odor.
Every paper straw is Sweet, Clean, and Perfect.
Stone’s Patent Julep Straws Can Never be Used But Once, as They Will Always Show the Marks of Use.
Cheaper and Better than natural straws.
Health, Cleanliness, and Economy is assured by using Stone’s Patent Julep Straws.
This was not the end of straw innovation however. In the 1930s another inventor, Joseph Friedmen, was sitting in his brother’s fountain parlour (a place to buy and consume soft drinks) and saw that his daughter was struggling to drink her drink from a tall glass with a straight straw. That night at home he put a screw into a paper straw, wrapped dental floss around the outside following the line of the screw’s thread, then upon removing both had created a bendy straw. This is the original design from his notebook:
(It is interesting to note that the problem he was seeking to solve had already been solved by the Sumerians 6,000 years before – as the earlier image shows – by having a kink in their straws.) He patented his invention in 1937 and, but having failed to get existing straw manufacturers interested in the concept, set up his own company and eventually started manufacturing the straws in 1947. Despite their origin story, they were originally marketed to hospitals, but soon spread into mainstream usage.
The next innovation was the invention of the plastic straw in the 1960s, and this combined with the explosion in fast-food restaurants drove straw use to stratospheric levels. One commonly cited figure is that Americans use 500 million disposal plastic straws per day! It turns out the calculations behind this figure were, err, done by a 9-year-old boy, but he wasn’t far out. Industry estimates put the figure at more like 390 million. Still that is enough in a year to make a band around the equator 700 straws wide from the USA’s consumption alone!
Billions of plastic straws end up in our oceans each year and this has led to understandable concerns about the pollution they cause and numerous initiatives to curb their use. One alternative that is in vogue at the moment is using a washable, reusable, metal straw. I like to think that if Queen Puabi of Ur was still around she would raise a wry smile at that. After all, she was using a metal straw 4,500 years ago…
16th-century Spanish is not my forte, so this translation comes from a couple of English fragments, running the full original through Google Translate, and creatively combining it all. It therefore isn’t perfect, but I think it is a fairly good representation of the original.
Something that I find incredibly irritating on the rare occasions that I frequent such establishments. Should I experience it again I suspect that I will be even more annoyed, because I now know that they are mimicking a practice that was driven by necessity, rather than style.
Swisher sticks? How do they fit into this wonderful and illuminating work?