99% Invisible - 322- The First Straw

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America. The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public-health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things—rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss. The First Straw

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Over the summer, a new movement started to gain momentum. The movement to ban plastic drinking straws. It's now legal for food service businesses in Seattle to provide plastic straws and utensils. Santa Cruz is among 28 others around the country that have banned or limited plastic straws or are considering it. California and Hawaii are even exploring statewide policies. Environmentalists say 500 million plastic straws end up in the world's oceans every year,

harming wildlife. The argument against straws is pretty simple. We consume tons of plastic. Not much of it gets recycled. Most of it ends up in landfills and oceans. So why not try to reduce a little of that waste? But like most issues these days, there's been a lot of disagreement about it.

There's been backlash from a few directions, including conservatives. The left's war against weight for it straws. It's all about your moral preening, right? It's this idea that we are holier than thou. But people with disabilities also spoke up because some of those folks actually need straws in order to drink.

That it might take away their tool of independence. And there's even disagreement about the actual number of straws that we throw away each day. You hear the number 500 million floating around a lot. Apparently, that number came not from a rigorous study, but from a precocious nine-year-old science project. Not a nine-year-old science project, a nine-year-old science project.

This was really taking on. Even the environmentalists could not agree on whether the straw band was a good thing or not. Yeah, everybody got to have their thing. The real problem is cars, the real problem is buildings, the real problem is, have you seen China's emissions, you know, the real problem is too much nitrogen and, you know, ocean acidification and, you know, just any environmental problem is probably more important than plastic straws. This is journalist Alexis Madrigal. He wrote a great essay about plastic straws

for the Atlantic and he's going to be our guide through all of this because he says that when you zoom out from the Controversies of today and look at the actual history of plastic straws, they can tell us a lot about America. So tell me about some of those bigger themes that emerged when you looked at the history of plastic straws. Yeah, so you know, I used to do this quite a bit like just take some little object and just trace its history. You know, you can look up the patents on Google and you can search around for the companies that made it and you can see its technical evolution. You can just look at it the way you would look at the development of any technology. But the thing that was so crazy about the straw was that it just hits so many of these

like real true major trends in the way that the country worked. You know, the straw is there for the invention of American industrialism, for urbanization, for public health reform, for like the suburbanization of the country, fast food, and now of course the culture war. It's there for all of that. And so tell me where it all began. Did someone invent the straw? Or was it just always there?

So there's even scientific studies that show that orangutans go like, hey, this straw-like thing is cool for doing straw-like stuff. So it's probably been around forever. There's ancient versions, etc. But in 19th century America, basically the straw was rye, literally, you know, grass that grows and it's kind of got this hollow tube. And, you know, you dry it, you cut it into shape and that's what would happen.

That was the straw, straw was straw. Around this time, there were also straws made out of more durable materials, like metal and glass. But then, then, you know, along comes this guy in 1888, named Marvin Stone, and he creates what was then called the artificial straw. And the artificial straw is basically paper dipped in some kind of waxy substance like paraffin, and that becomes this new standard.

And it wasn't just that it was artificial. It's also that it was disposable, this straw. That's right. This was basically this incredibly cheap and this incredibly basically disposable and hygienic thing. This wasn't something that came from nature. It was, in fact, produced to a standard, you know. This was a patent straw. And the fact that this straw was hygienic and produced to a standard was important, because straws were becoming a tool in the emerging public health movement that was happening in cities around this time. So you know, the reason public health is emerging at this time is because people in American

cities are just like dying all the time of communicable diseases. And a lot of illnesses were spread through dirty drinking water. To understand why this was such a big health issue and why straws would eventually help to solve it, you have to understand how public water fountains worked at the time. In a lot of places in the city, both workplaces and in public locations, the water fountain wasn't like what we think of now, like this little thing with water bubbling out of it or like you press a little button, water comes out. It was just kind of like water that was sitting there or a little tap and you would actually fill a, water comes out, it was just kind of like water that was sitting there

or a little tap and you would actually fill a cup that was attached to it and just drink out of it and it'd be like, you know, on some kind of chain or whatever. So, you know, a bunch of different people would all drink from the same cup. We actually did an episode about this. These early water fountains use something called the Common Cup. And it became one of the main targets

of the public health campaigners. There was actually like one Kansas doctor who started to like push this campaign against the Common Cup. And the tone of this campaign, its intense. They literally would show the grim reaper taking a drink from the Common Cup with like a little girl next to him.

And you just be like, Jesus man, they're just drinking from the same cup, you know? And in times when you want public health reform or some kind of reform, you just need to go for the throat. You know, like, this is going to kill your children, you know? That's like, that's where they went with it. A lot of cities began requiring straw dispensers in certain public spaces. In the case of the common cup, straws were a way to avoid actually putting your mouth where somebody else's mouth had been. But it wasn't just public health reformers

that contributed to the rise of straws. There's two things. There's a sort of public health mania on the one side. And on the other side, there's the development of a certain bubbly carbonated beverage called soda. And the soda fountain occupies this really important place in the kind of late 19th century, early 20th century city, just as a space.

For one, most of the public places where you could go have a drink were saloons, and saloons were primarily gendered male. But urban women, with increasing freedoms in the city, wanted a place to go. And many urban women were also involved in various temperance movements, and again, saloons, they're servant booze there, and soda fountains become this kind of like clean, healthy alternative. So there are all these various trends. Urbanization, the rise, the soda fountain, the temperance movement, the rise of public health,

they all help lead to this booming straw industry, really. Yeah, and it's amazing because if you look at, there's a, the battle, creek inquiry, you know, small paper in May of 1924, they actually sort of list out how far did this go? You know how big was this boom? And they say, due to the Yankee Mania for sanitation, the output of artificial straws has increased from 165 million in 1901 to 4 billion a year. A manufacturer pointed out yesterday that laid end to end these straws would build an ants subway 16 times around the world at the equator.

And so four billion straws in context, you're talking about America has 114 million people at that point. Yeah, so 35 straws per capita. That's a lot of straws. I mean, I can say I actually probably do. I'm actually almost sure that I'm probably like a hundred straw year kind of guy. By the 1950s and 60s, the straw would become less an actual driver of important cultural change and more of this tiny kind of insignificant object surfing along much bigger trends, trends

like the rise of fast food culture. Introducing the world, New York, New York, New York, and Tim Burger eating his flound, Ronald McDonald. Before a businessman named Ray Croc took over a little restaurant in Southern California called McDonald's, he was a paper cup salesman. Which meant that he was also a straw salesman. So he worked for the LilyToolup Paper Company

for a long time, like, you know, 15 years, going around the Midwest, selling straws and cups, the soda fountains. But what's amazing to hear, you know, and he wrote a memoir, which, I mean, he ran a burger shop and he called his memoir, Grinding It Out, which I think kind of tells you a little bit about him.

He also turns out he, like, moon-lighted as a pianist when he was a salesman, like just kind of one of those, like, really doesn't feel like a 21st century story. Like it feels like a, like a, wow, that's a weird story. But Ray Crock in this memoir, grinding it out, he describes paper cups in this kind of disposable, you know, hygienic world. He was like, they were innovative and upbeat. He said, I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed.

He was right. Like that was part of the way America was going. Like every, we were gonna throw away everything. We throw away f**k phones. You know what I mean? Like we throw away computers. We throw away couches, you know know what I mean? Like we throw away computers, we throw away couches. You know?

So Croc becomes a central figure, at least in my story, because he sort of connects this paper cup industry to this greater concept of like disposability in America. Selling all those cups brought Ray Croc into contact with Soda Founts and he eventually went into business selling milkshake mixers This led him to Southern California Resolved the first McDonald's in operation He bought his way into the small company and ousted the original owners in the 60s

This is crazy McDonald's goes from basically like a hundred franchises to a thousand And then just like keeps on going, pure like kind of hockey stick growth. The American public are basically beef eating people. And it wears well, day after day after day after day. People just want more of it. And I can't give them everything they like, but this one thing I sure can give them.

And you have with basically the rise of fast food and suburbia, this massive increase in the amount of just kind of wrapping basically for food. You're getting your food in a box and that just hadn't been the way that things were traditionally done. So like the plastic industry at the same time is growing up because of this disposable trend. Can you talk about this transition from paper straws to plastic straws? Yes. One thing that's interesting about plastics, you know, 1950, the world is only producing like one and a half million tons of plastic, which of course is a lot because plastic doesn't

weigh very much, but it's not, it's nowhere close to sort of where we get. I mean, by the late 60s, that production has grown 10 fold. So it's really kind of in the 50s, into the 60s, where basically people are going, is there an object? Maybe it should be plastic. You know? And so, you know, chairs become plastic,

and plates become plastic, and just everything kind of, if you can do it, you can do it in plastic. And so of course, straws become part of this. But the 1970s and 80s, plastic straws had become ubiquitous. They were everywhere. And while straw design continued to evolve slightly, the more dramatic changes were happening in the straw industry.

At this point, both in our economy and also in the sort of like the straws history, it's really the mechanisms that organize the factories that become the most interesting sort of object. And those mechanisms are basically financial capitalism beginning to really move away from being about family businesses, organizing production, you know, at these kind of local levels or regional levels, and it really becomes everything is just a money waiting to be made through financialization.

By financialization, Lexus is talking about a big trend in economics that's been happening over the last few decades. Our manufacturing sector has been shrinking while our financial sector has been expanding, which has big implications for who ends up making money on straws and a million other consumer goods. The slice of money that's going to the people who provide the money as opposed to provide

the products is growing. And that has really important consequences for how things get made and who makes them and where the factories are located and how many people are employed and the culture of work and all these things. So tell me what happened to Maryland Cup. This is one of the country's biggest straw makers. What would happen to them around this time? So Maryland Cup is just a classic American story, right?

It's owned by these brothers, the Shapiro brothers. They started out as like a bakery, and then they turned into this kind of bakery services provider, and then they start making straws. So after they make straws, they make cups after they make cups, they get sort of become one of the big partners for McDonald's. And it remained basically family owned. But eventually, you know, the original management is gone, the people are aging, and they decide that they're going to sell the company. They sell the company to another company called Fort Howard.

And they had one of these kind of hard charging CEOs, and there's a great story in the Baltimore Sun where they describe going to the sales meeting, the Maryland Cup executives like all show up, and the new bosses are there. And he literally apparently had a flip chart, and on the one page of the flip chart, it said, here are your old values, and they were service, quality, responding to customers, and they're apparently literally like,

flip the flip chart to the next page, and it said, new values, profits, profits, profits. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I was like, damn, that's quite a PowerPoint, you know? Marilyn Cup had been a very profitable company with a highly family oriented kind of culture. You know, the bosses would dress up as Santa Claus, you know, turkeys to all everybody that Thanksgiving,

you know, that kind of like paternalistic, we are all one big family company thing. Once they go into Fort Howard, it becomes a true, just kind of like, we're gonna have to make money. So all these people get laid off, they cut pensions, they do all this stuff that's basically like the plot of Tommy Boy, kind of,

you remember this movie with Chris Farley about San Dusky Ohio? Ladies and gentlemen, we're in real trouble. So, Lensky Industries has an offer on the table to buy us out. But as you realize, Callahan has been family-owned since Tommy's great-grandfather laid the first brick. And I'll be damned if that's gonna change on my watch. Frankie, if we sell Waller values still,

I, everyone won't stop. You know, but it's played out many my watch, Frank, if we sell well our values still, I, everyone, won't stop. You know, but it's played out many, many, many, many times. And in the end, what ends up happening is that Fort Howard itself then is bought by a private equity firm who then goes and combines a bunch of the different paper cup and disposable goods companies into one kind of larger entity

and then spins it out loaded with a bunch of debt. And this is kind of a classic move that happens in private equity because you can borrow against these companies, pay your investors, and then spin out this other company that is like sort of floating in the ocean like with the rock's tied around its feet, right? So operationally, like from making cups and straws

and all this stuff, they're still making money, but because they have to pay all this debt, they're deeply in the red, so then they have to lay off people, then they have to close factories, and it is just the classic story of kind of like, vulture capitalism. And the fact that the straw,

they're like that the straw, they're like the stupid straw, this empty vessel, somehow also is tied up in the financialization of America. Just says one thing to me, which is that every single goddamn thing is tied up with this kind of system of production. [♪ Music playing in background,

Can banning straws really make a dent in our ecological problems? No. No, I mean, it's just not up to the scale of the problem. I think the through line I see with all this stuff, because obviously it's hard to connect, you know, a 1888 patent to the, you know, first artificial straw to, you know, financial capitalism and its current form. Here's the through line as I see it. The country has shed manufacturing jobs for decades, straws contribute. They're a little tiny share to environmental disasters that are far beyond it. I mean, the economy continues to work in this way that concentrates wealth, you know, for the very richest people. You know, the sodas that are even like passing through the straws into people's stomachs are contributing to this obesity epidemic that threatens to actually roll back the public health

reforms that actually got people's life expectancies to grow in previous eras. And there's this's this vast system. Now that's attached to the straw that helped really to create disposable products and then disposable companies. I find that kind of disposable people, both the workers who work within this system but also people who just have to live

with all of these crises that have been created by structures far beyond their control. And so it was almost like, though we can all see that going on around us, it's kind of only when you focus down on like the most tiny thing that you can see that massive structure, right? In this kind of very pure way. Arguably the most significant technological achievement of the 20th century, at least according to one of the descendants of the inventor. It's the story of the bendy straw. After this.

As Alexis mentioned earlier, the Maryland Cup Corporation got bought out and then its buyers got bought out and so on up the capitalist fast food chain. But before Maryland cupped sold their family business, they grew in part by acquiring a revolutionary key patent from another company. Kurt Colesit is here to talk about that other family on business that they bought out the flexible straw corporation. So first a bit of context. As Alexis pointed out, we'll never really know when humans first started using straws, but there's this Sumerian tomb

that dates back about 5,000 years. And on its seal, there are these figures who appear to be drinking from straws. Sure enough, when people opened up the tomb, they found this ornate drinking tube inside. It's made of gold and decked out with these precious stones. It's really fancy and it's really old. And it's probably not the oldest straw that ever existed,

just the oldest one we've found. Right, it may not even be close. Right. But setting its expensive materials aside, it's still just a straight tube, a bit more durable, a bit more precious, sure. But otherwise, not that different from a modern grass or paper or plastic straw.

So in a lot of ways, straw design hasn't fundamentally changed for thousands of years, or at least it didn't until the 1930s. And that's when the flexible straw came into existence? Yes. And as the story goes, the inventor, Joseph B. Friedman,

took his daughter to get a milkshake in San Francisco at a sweet shop owned by his brother. But as he's watching his daughter struggle with this normal straight straw, he thinks to himself, hey, you know, maybe there's a better way to do this. And it's like the classic, you see a problem, you fix a problem,

but this guy wasn't a straw maker by trade, how did he create this new object? So he starts out with this simple existing paper straw. And then he slots in a middle screw into the neck, and then he wraps dental floss around the screw So that when he tightens it down it creates ridges Right, and these ridges allow the thing to bend you know like an accordion So you just use the screws threading to provide the groove and then you tighten it and take the back out of it

And then you get a flexi straw, so like really anybody could have done this right and he's really clear about this too in the patent application He's like look. I didn't invent the accordion. I didn't invent the straw All I did was I combined this idea of flexibility with this you know straight tube for drinking out of so he MacGuyvers this thing into existence does it revolutionize the industry right away? What does it do it actually took a while for these flexible straws to catch on, which is kind of shocking. Well, because his brother owned his soda shop. Like, when he's getting his like, he's got a path to market. Right.

And yet somehow it takes him like 10 years to start selling these things. That's a long time to live on hope. Yeah, it really is. And he ended up taking other jobs on the side. He did some work as a real estate agent, sort of keep it alive. And he also got cash infusions from his brothers who invested in the business, got some business help from his sister Betty, who, by many accounts, the sort of the brains of the operation.

And then finally, 10 years later, they get their first buyers, and it has nothing to do with kids or stuff to shop. So who are the first people to buy Flexi Strossin? And it ends up being these large hospitals, which if you think about it, makes perfect sense. They've got injured patients, disabled patients, people lying in beds who have trouble sitting up.

And so these flex straws, which are, you know, bendable, disposable, sanitary, they're just perfect for these hospital environments. And from there, of course, they go on to restaurants and kids juice boxes and all that, but they start out in hospitals. It's a really interesting example of universal design, where it's really taken by a community that needs it,

and then everyone realizes, hey, these are kind of nice for us, too. You know, as we mentioned before, there's some movement to have all plastic straws banned. Do they still have a place in society? I mean, that's really debatable, and it's still being debated. And some people are saying, hey, look, let's go back to these paper bendy straws.

That worked, right? That's what Friedman was inventing within the first place. But then a lot of disability rights activists are saying, hey, you know, that's great for some people, but they can also fall apart. They're not that durable. And there's also an argument that, okay, well, then we should use reusable ones, right? That are sort of more eco-friendly, like, glass or metal, but those are hard to keep clean.

They can break. So there are issues with all these different types. And for a certain demographic of people who really needs them, there's a strong argument for keeping around plastic bindi straws. You can see pictures and patterns of Freemont's original flex straw and old vintage print ads for them too. They're delightful.

That's on our website. It's at 99pi.org. 99% of visible was produced this week by senior editor Delaney Hall, based on the story disposable America by Alexis Madrigal, written for the Atlantic. Mix and Tech Production by Sheree F Usif, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is Vivian Lee,

Avery Truffman, Joe Rosenberg, and Mitt Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in St. Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, in downtown Oakland California 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Org.

We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you can listen to and read a ton more stories that use everyday objects to tell the story of the whole world at nyanipi.org. Radio Tepi-R-X