Let's All Go Green - and Get e-Coli While We're at It

Plastic drinking straws are now on the No! No! List, a list kept carefully by such as a woman named Jackie Nunez who founded The Last Plastic Straw campaign to make restaurants (for example) make you ask if you want a straw with your drink.  Okay, do local residents remember the Great Drought when restaurant diners had to ask for a glass of water?  I do, and no one had a problem with it.

But this is where I do have a problem.  In 2010 Ms. Nunez was leading a kayaking tour in Belize when she came across a large mass of plastic debris.  "That's what really sent me over the edge," she said, "a literal river of trash was going by.  I really was beside myself."  This is the kind of 'tude that gives American tourists the "Ugly" when referenced by the locals. 

Notice the personalization - "I was beside myself ... sent me over the edge."  If I lived in Belize, I would have been tempted to offer to help her pack for her return trip to wherever she lives in the U.S.  Let her go kill plastic at home.

All of the above was triggered by the front page of today's Daily Breeze.  Manhattan Beach has banned plastic straws.  The City offers alternatives to (shudder! eeek!) plastic and suggests you use lengths of bamboo, surgical steel or glass instead. 

Here are a couple of the disadvantages...
Stainless steel - Williams Sonoma no longer carries them and didn't say why.  Since W-S has never turned down the possibility of a profit in living memory, there has to be something wrong with them.

Glass - give one to your kid!  You'll be picking glass shards out of his mouth before you know it!

Bamboo - cannot be put through the dishwasher (and I wouldn't want to try it with glass either - especially at $6 per straw -  I've got champagne flutes I paid less for and that have lasted 25 years)  It is suggested that the bamboo straws are immersed in hot soapy water instead.  Use a pipe cleaner to clean them.  Once a month boil up a batch of water and vinegar and soak them.

Cost and labor-free alternative.  Learn to drink out of a glass.  If you shriek that you need a straw for your milkshake?  You shouldn't be having one anyhow.  Do you have any idea how fattening they are?