Disposable cups are an offence against humanity and a blight on the soul. Consider the Styrofoam cup. Not only is ‘styrofoam’ diabolically hard to type, it is also detrimental to our ability to be completely human. I don’t mean it’s environmentally dangerous or bad for your health, although aren’t we all given to understand that the world will be at least armpit deep in the non-biodegradable miscreants by 2025, but that these sinister little cups actually make it harder for us to be human beings.

This argument proceeds along two lines, which will now be lamentably conflated. Firstly, we will consider form. What, I ask you, is uglier than a Styrofoam cup? This blank white, sterile contraption is as close to drinking out of an aseptic hospital operating room as we’ve managed to get. It has no color, no detail, and no imaginable aesthetic of any kind, assuming you exclude Soviet Utilitarianism as a style option. The damn things are so light as to be weightless. They produce no satisfactory sense of mass in the hand, and furthermore manifest a nasty habit of tipping over at the slightest provocation. They aren’t much better once liquid is actually situated inside, and only a minimum of 20¢ in pennies at the bottom of your beverage will truly remedy the problem. These vessels are also flimsy—crushable by the merest infant, or capable of being bit clean through in the slightest states of absentmindedness.

Secondly, we turn our thoughts to function. I concede, in advance of argument, that Styrofoam cups A) transport liquid B) perform the miraculous feat of keeping hot liquid hot and cold liquid cold, and C) do all this while being portable, inexpensive and disposable. These are all the reasons I myself have committed the sin of Styrofoam cup use, and yet, friends, I must raise a lament.

Why on earth do we require such a portable, multifunctional, disposable container? For thousands of years of human history, we managed to do without a device that relieves us of the stress of having to sit in one place to consume a beverage out of a cup which cannot be thrown away. Consider Cro-Magnon man, coming into his local pub after a long day of grunting and rock chewing only to ask for a cool glass of prehistoric beer ‘to go’ in order to get back to dinosaur-fleeing immediately. No, no, reason doth protest. Cro-Magnon man must have had the sense to stop, relax and linger with others of his longhaired, heavy-browed cronies until last call. No sense of anxious hurry animates Cro-Magnon man whilst he is quaffing and chatting. The world must wait.

It is equally ludicrous for most moderns to imagine themselves slowing down long enough to use real, honest-to-goodness glass or ceramic drinking devices. Take today, for instance. I ‘met a friend for coffee,’ which really means I took turns rapidly exchanging pointed questions with her for ten minutes over an expendable coffee cup before obligations called us away. In such a case, nothing but disposable will do.

But imagine if all coffee were served in pretty red glazed mugs? You’d have to sit down and drink it like the civilized cavepersons from whence you are descended. Weighty, colorful glass in hand, you would pause and chat over your beverage with a glow of peace in your soul. No longer victim to the dry-rot induced by hurry and disposable cups, your soul would send you its heartiest thanks, and settle into a happier, more human existence. Cro-Magnon man would be proud.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 12:51 pm and is filed under From the nation of Indig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.