One Man's Ruined Mint Julep Gave America 150 Years of Plastic Straws — and Now We Can't Agree on What to Do About It

One Man's Ruined Mint Julep Gave America 150 Years of Plastic Straws — and Now We Can't Agree on What to Do About It

Somewhere around 1888, a man named Marvin Stone was sitting with a mint julep and a problem. The problem was the straw. At the time, people who wanted to sip a drink without putting their lips directly on the glass used hollow stalks of rye grass — a natural, technically functional, deeply imperfect solution. The grass gave the drink a grassy flavor. It got soggy. It fell apart mid-sip.

Stone, who manufactured paper cigarette holders in Washington, D.C., decided he could do better. He wound strips of paper around a pencil, glued the edges together, and slid the pencil out. The result was a paper tube that didn't taste like a lawn and didn't dissolve in your hand.

He filed a patent in 1888. He had no idea what he'd started.

A Fix That Was Never Supposed to Last

Stone's paper straw was, by any reasonable measure, a temporary solution. He invented it to solve a specific, minor irritation with a specific drink. There was nothing about his invention that suggested it would become a defining object of American food culture, manufactured by the billions, handed out automatically with every soda, milkshake, and iced coffee for the next century and a half.

But that's exactly what happened — and the path from a handmade paper tube in a D.C. workshop to a plastic straw in every drive-thru cup holder in America runs through some unexpected places.

Stone's company, the Stone Straw Corporation, scaled up production quickly. By the early twentieth century, paper straws were a legitimate consumer product, popular at soda fountains and in restaurants. The invention arrived at exactly the right moment: American cities were growing, public health concerns about shared drinking vessels were rising, and the soda fountain was becoming a cultural institution. A personal straw — your own straw, used once and discarded — fit perfectly into the era's anxieties about germs and its enthusiasm for modern convenience.

The Soda Fountain Era and the Paper Straw's Golden Age

For the first half of the twentieth century, paper straws were everywhere. Drugstore soda fountains stocked them by the thousands. They came in colors and stripes. Kids collected them. The image of a teenager at a soda counter, two straws in a shared milkshake, is a paper straw image — even if most people don't think of it that way.

The straw had also quietly expanded its reach beyond novelty drinks. Hospitals used them for patients who couldn't lift a glass. Bars used them for cocktails. They showed up at diners, at lunch counters, at ballparks. The object had moved from a solution to one man's julep problem into something close to a default feature of drinking in public.

Then came plastic.

Postwar Plastic and the Straw's Second Life

After World War II, American manufacturing was awash in cheap plastic. The material could be molded into almost anything, was more durable than paper, and cost almost nothing to produce at scale. The plastics industry was actively looking for everyday applications, and the straw was an obvious candidate.

By the 1960s, plastic straws had largely replaced paper ones. They were clearer, stronger, and didn't go limp in a cold drink. Fast food chains — which were exploding across the American landscape during this same period — standardized plastic straws as part of their operations. A McDonald's straw in 1970 looked almost identical to one you'd get today. The design had essentially stopped evolving because it didn't need to. It worked.

For decades, nobody questioned it. The straw was just there — a given, a default, something that came with your drink whether you wanted it or not. Estimates from this period suggest the United States alone was using somewhere between 170 million and 500 million plastic straws per day. The numbers are so large they're almost meaningless, which is part of the problem.

The Environmental Reckoning

The straw's fall from grace was fast and, for an object that had been invisible for a century, surprisingly dramatic. Environmental advocates had been raising concerns about single-use plastics for years, but the straw became the specific flashpoint. A widely circulated 2015 video showing a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril hit the internet and didn't let go. The straw was suddenly a symbol — not just of plastic waste, but of the entire culture of throwaway convenience that had built up around American food and drink.

Cities began banning plastic straws. Starbucks announced it would phase them out. McDonald's started testing paper alternatives in Europe. The backlash to the backlash came quickly too — disability advocates pointed out, correctly, that flexible plastic straws are a genuine accessibility tool for people who cannot drink from a cup without assistance. The conversation got complicated in a hurry.

Paper straws came back, and the reaction to them revealed something about how much Americans had come to expect from their throwaway objects. The complaints were immediate: they get soggy, they taste weird, they collapse. Which is, more or less, exactly what Marvin Stone said about rye grass in 1888.

The Object That Refused to Be Simple

The straw's history is a clean illustration of how a quick fix can calcify into infrastructure. Stone invented a disposable solution to a minor problem, and within a few decades it had become so embedded in the way Americans drink that removing it felt like a radical act.

Alternatives keep arriving — silicone straws, metal straws, bamboo straws, straws made from pasta or seaweed or hay. Some restaurants have stopped offering straws unless a customer asks. Others have quietly gone back to plastic.

The mint julep that started all of this is still made the same way it's always been made. It doesn't typically come with a straw.