I was holding court in a self-consciously “edgy” cocktail bar recently, settling in for a few hours of conversation and what should have been effortless drinking. Instead, I found myself fascinated, and then horrified, by a ritual playing out before me. Every single glass that hit the table arrived with a plastic straw.
But this wasn’t just your standard, grab-a-handful-from-the-dispenser service. The waitress was standing there, meticulously snipping lengths off the plastic straws with a pair of scissors to ensure they perfectly matched the height of the specific vessel. A customized plastic bypass for a coupe; a shortened tube for a tumbler. It was a level of bespoke futility that truly boggles the mind.
At what point did the industry decide that adult humans had forgotten how to use a glass? Over the course of the evening, our table accumulated a small graveyard of plastic tubing, custom-cut to facilitate an act we are genetically designed to perform without assistance.
It’s an infantilizing practice. Last time I checked, evolution had equipped us with a fairly sophisticated apparatus for imbibing liquids. We have lips. We have a tongue. We possess the motor skills to tilt a vessel towards our face. Yet, we are presented with these engineered extraction devices as if we are toddlers in need of a sippy cup.
More importantly, it destroys the sensory experience. Glassware is designed for a reason. The rim of a glass is engineered to deliver liquid to specific parts of the palate and place your nose right in the action. A straw bypasses the nose entirely, chemically lobotomizing the drink by removing the olfactory component. You can’t smell the botanicals if you’re sucking them through a snipped-off tube from six inches away.
Unless you are physically incapacitated, you do not need a straw. It should be a utensil of last resort, on request only, not a mandatory, hand-tailored garnish.
Life is so tech. But drinking is strictly analog.
Mark Fancourt
