These bamboo straws look cool in this nice clean, dry bundle but…
A few months ago, I was in a dirt-floor, open air, cafe in rural Mexico. We received our drinks and asked for popotes (straws – before we had fully appreciated the evil of plastic straws and assessed the risk/benefit of drinking beverages in dusty Mexican cafes with or without plastic straws). Our hostess happily brought us a handful of these bamboo straws and… OH GOD THE HORROR. They were wet (hopefully washed, hopefully washed in bottled water, hopefully sanitized in some rural Mexican way). And, as wet bamboo does, the bamboo straws had swollen to the point that you could not see through the straws as you might look through a cardboard tube. Instead, holding the straws to our eyes, the insides were black and sort of fuzzy looking - no daylight to be seen through this little tube of doom. Needless to say, I opted to go bare lips to beverage and skip the bamboo popotes.
