Plastic Straws Are A Strange Hill to Die On

The other night I found myself watching a video about a bar which has started using straws made out of pasta as a biodegradable alternative to plastic straws. Now, obviously I’m a coeliac, so this isn’t something I would personally ever want, and I could see a few other flaws with the idea. But overall, I thought it was cool that the bar was thinking about the problem, and approaching it with creativity and innovation.

And then I read the comments.

Man, this has to have been one of the most bizarrely passionate comments sections I have ever read. People were mad about food wastage, people were mad that we don’t just drink straight out of the glass, people were mad at hipsters… the anger just went on and on. But the comments that surprised me were the many many able bodied and normal-eating people getting mad on behalf of coeliac and disabled people.

So, the coeliac part of this is kind of obvious. If you order a drink, you don’t expect for it to arrive with a lump of glutenous pasta in it, and in all honesty if I drank out of a straw assuming it was a normal one, and then later found out it was made of gluten, I would be pretty annoyed. But that scenario is quite unlikely. While there obviously is a noble environmental motivation behind this, the pasta straws are clearly also (at least in part) an advertising gimmick for this bar. They’re not keeping the fact that their straws are made of pasta a secret – they’re proclaiming it loudly for all to hear. It may become an issue down the track, when the novelty wears off, but any problems would be mitigated by a simple note on the menu saying that the straws contain gluten and to let staff know if you have an allergy.

The disability part of this is a bit more complicated. For some people with disabilities, differences in strength, function or movement can mean that straws are an essential part of daily living. People facing these issues may not be able drink safely or independently without them. In this case, straws usually do need to be plastic, as the size and malleability are important, and therefore metal or pasta straws aren’t always a suitable replacement. Straws are also often used in rest homes and hospitals for similar reasons, and again alternatives other than plastic probably wouldn’t be appropriate.

When I saw comments along these lines, and realised the majority of them were coming from able-bodied people, at first I felt pleasantly surprised. It was nice to see able-bodied people thinking outside of their own experience and considering what impact a simple change might have on people with disabilities. But as I read on, and the anger and vitriol in the comments rose, I started to feel a bit odd about it.

While it is nice to see able-bodied people going out of their way to advocate for people with coeliac and/or disabilities, I feel like this is kind of a weird one for people to be getting so passionate about. The gluten stuff is a potential danger, but it wouldn’t be that hard to remedy with clear labelling and a few simple kitchen protocols to avoid cross-contamination. With the disability stuff, the times I’ve eaten in a café or restaurant with someone who needed a straw to be able to drink, that straw came from the person’s bag not from the restaurant itself. This isn’t my experience, so I can’t say this for sure, but my guess would be that it’s pretty common for people who need straws to carry their own, as they couldn’t be sure of always being able to get one from a bar/restaurant. While people needing access to plastic straws is an issue, I’m just not sure bars not supplying them is as big of an issue as some were making out.

The thing that bothered me the most about this though, is I don’t often see this level of passion from able-bodied people over other disability or illness issues. There have been so many times when I or someone else has pointed out that something is not accessible, and the response has been “Oh… that’s a shame,” and a swift change of subject. Worse, online the response is often defensive, angry or filled with nasty personal attacks, instead of doing anything to try to understand or mitigate the problem.

Where is the passion and support for those things, which (in my opinion) cause a much bigger barrier to disabled people participating in life? I know, we all have our own lives, our own causes and we simply can’t get involved in fighting for everything. But I do have to ask myself why, when people are finally getting passionately involved, is it over plastic straws?

Now I don’t want the take away from this to be “stop caring about plastic straws.” This is a real issue – both from an environmental perspective, and from the point of view of making sure people who need straw still have access to them. But if you care about plastic straws for people with disabilities, maybe just try to use some of that passion towards other disabilities issues too.

Thanks for reading,

Little Miss Autoimmune