Dr. Zhivago and "The Secrets we Kept"

This is a terrible way to waste 15 minutes, but I've been researching the use of polystyrene foam as disposable coffee cups. I'm reading a spy novel ("The secrets we kept" by Lara Prescott). It's 1956 and the typing pool is gathered at the coffee shop (in Washington DC, and I don't yet know who the spies are but the latest fad in novels is to have bright young women save the West as spies). Here's the line that stopped me. "The Agency's own brew, though brown and hot, tasted more like the Styrofoam cups we drank it from."

Doesn't that sound like an anachronism to you? So of course, I looked it up. Not a lot of history (with dates) for polystyrofoam cups, but AI tried. Seems this environmental disaster was developed in 1954 and the foam cups created in 1957. Sometime in the 1960s they began to be used for disposable coffee cups, and 7-11 popularized them around 1964. The big use expansion of these cups was the 1970s and 80s. That's the bare bones, and right now if you're drinking disposably, it's probably a paper cup with a thin plastic coating (which may be leaching into your coffee), and the BIG advancement was in the development of the lids.

Back to the spies. This novel is built about Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago," and although I'm not sure I read it, I did see the movie several times. Also I took Russian in college and I can pronounce the names. The author's name is Lara, as was the love interest in Pasternak's novel.

https://youtu.be/WiWWa-T0EIY?si=e22chGIuSSxQafZX  Lara's Theme