Plastic straws suck; pick what’s rye-ght

Americans alone discard 500 million plastic straws a day, so the worldwide figure, if ever computed, would be even more alarming. If our planet has to be saved from becoming one gigantic bale of indestructible plastic straw(s), a sustainable solution is imperative. The current move by the EU and others to ban the world’s favourite drinking aid — as if humans really need help to imbibe — is welcome, but another solution may lie in delving into the origin of the implement’s innocuous name: straw. Ancient remains reveal that the Babylonian elite had a predilection for drinking tubes made of lapis lazuli and precious ores but, clearly, that could not be scaled up for use by the masses. So, the canny use of the by-product of rye harvesting — the remaindered hollow stalks or straw —as a drinking implement in the 19th century in the US was downright ingenious.

Unfortunately, rye straws turned to mush and left a grassy aftertaste, which led to the invention of the paper version and, finally, the ecologically disastrous, if efficient, plastic straw. However, modern technology can easily eliminate rye’s grassy residuum, an issue some have with bamboo straws too. Wheat straws are also an alternative — an edible one at that, if bucatini pasta is used imaginatively! In short, if we do not suck it up, it could be the last straw for this planet.