Let's go back to 4/6/02 on this blog…one of a series of posts I was doing around then about things that mattered to my childhood. This one's about Flav-R Straws, which are no longer made under that name. There are a few other versions around of what is essentially the same product. One is called Magic Milk Straws. I doubt they mean as much to kids today as Flav-R Straws did to me and my friends…
Time to reminisce about another food product of my childhood…and I'm being very liberal with my definition of a "food product" by applying it to Flav-R Straws. They were, of course, another plot by the chemical geniuses of Corporate America to turn kids' milk some odd color. In this case, the options were pink and a pale beige, though they somehow claimed these had something to do with "strawberry," "chocolate" and other "flavors."
A Flav-R Straw was an ordinary drinking straw with a flexible section — so you could bend it towards your mouth instead of moving your head two inches — and an odd, semi-toxic filament. Nestled inside each straw was a piece of porous material — a paper product, I suspect, though it could have been a sliver of animal skin, for all I know. The tiny strip was impregnated with the alleged flavor — that is to say, alleged chocolate or alleged strawberry or alleged whatever — and a whole load of Industrial Strength Food Coloring in brown or red variety.
The premise was that you'd stick one of these suckers in a glass of milk and then, as you sucked upon it, the pristine, white moo juice would pass through the filter and take on the hue and taste of it. And as you repeatedly dipped the straw, the remaining milk in the glass would be similarly transformed. My recollection is that it really didn't work that way or that well. For one thing, to get the milk through the blockade at all, you had to suck so hard, you practically developed a compound hernia in your cheek muscles. For another, even the small amount of milk that made it through was only faintly tinted or altered in any way. You could transfer a bit more "flav-r" to the milk by rapidly dipping the straw into the glass and withdrawing it, over and over for about an hour, but this felt silly and it still turned the liquid only slightly off-white.
Most kids just gave up and removed the Flav-R strip from the straw and tried sucking directly on it. Employed that way, it would yield a bitter taste but, at least, it turned your tongue brown so that had some value. Still, Flav-R Straws were a colossal disappointment…and, now that I think of it, that had a value, as well. We all have to learn in life that some things just don't work as advertised. Better we should learn it on something as silly and low-cost as Flav-R Straws. It fosters a kind of Consumer Skepticism that can be very handy, later in life. Then again, so can learning to suck real hard.
One last remembrance of Flav-R Straws: One time when we were both straining to get milk through ours, the girl who lived down the street from me asked what would happen if you tried to use a Flav-R Straw in a glass of Coca-Cola. I told her she would instantly die. She decided not to chance it.