The Merits of the Case

Sitting on the window ledge above my kitchen sink is a little clay dish that Matthew made in art class a few years ago. For the past couple of years, from October until December, the dish has been filled to overflowing with pink Yoplait yogurt lids which get dutifully mailed to the company sometime in December. Why do I mail used yogurt container lids to Yoplait, you ask? Because they have promised that they will donate 10 cents for each lid they receive up to $1.5 million to the Susan G. Komen foundation as part of their Save Lids to Save Lives campaign. Until last week, I was just washing the lids and putting them in the dish and that was about the extent of my thoughts about the campaign.

Recently, however, I stumbled upon a website called Think Before You Pink (maintained by Breast Cancer Action, a San Francisco-based company that provides educational information about breast cancer), and suddenly I’m looking at that Yoplait lid campaign—and all of the pink breast cancer awareness marketing out there—in a whole in new light. The gist of the Think Before You Pink website is that with the deluge of pink marketing going on throughout the year, it’s not a bad idea to think about where the money from those pink ribbon products is actually going.

Think Before You Pink hopes that before you open your wallet to buy these product you will ask yourself six questions. These questions are:
1. How much money from your purchase actually goes toward breast cancer?
2. What is the maximum amount that will be donated?
3. How much money was spent marketing the product?
4. How are the funds being raised?
5. To what breast cancer organization does the money go, and what types of programs does it support?
6. What is the company doing to assure that its products are not contributing to the breast cancer epidemic?
This page on their website goes into detail about what kinds of answers you should look for to each of those questions.

After finding this website, I read a little further and found that those innocuous Yoplait lids stacked up on my kitchen windowsill led me to some answers to those questions that I wasn’t so excited about.

For example, take question #6. It turns out that Yoplait makes its yogurt with milk from cows treated with rBGH, a bovine growth hormone that has been linked to an increase in breast, prostate, and colon cancer. I knew about this connection and have been buying milk from dairies that do not use rBGH, but I never thought about our yogurt containing the same hormone.

Think Before You Pink calls this practice “pinkwashing,” and applies the term to companies that market a pink ribbon product for the benefit of breast cancer research or awareness while manufacturing products that are linked to the disease. Other pinkwasher companies in Think’s spotlight include BMW (chemicals in car exhaust have been linked to breast cancer) and Estee Lauder (parabens used in cosmetics have been linked to breast cancer). Kind of puts a whole new spin on pink ribbon marketing, doesn’t it?

What do we do with this information? The Think Before You Pink website lists possible actions we can take to help combat pinkwashing. For example, they suggest buying non-rBGH dairy products and they even provide a link to an artificial hormone-free product guide broken down by state and published by www.foodandwaterwatch.org. The website also suggests letting the companies you patronize know if you feel strongly about their responsibility to keep their products safe.

While I appreciate any and all efforts to educate people and to find a cure for this disease, I think that the pink marketing has gotten out of hand. We are swamped with pink, especially in October, almost to the point of numbness. I think the Think Before You Pink campaign can help us all to be more educated, savvy consumers and to make sure that any dollars we spend on pink marketing are actually going to the breast cancer cause and not just to the coffers of some large corporation.

I want to make it clear that I support the desire of large corporations to donate to charities and I have no problem with marketing campaigns designed to highlight their charitable works, as long as the campaigns are transparent and the companies are really donating substantially to those causes. I still plan to send in my Yoplait lids, because 10 cents is better than no cents. (I have also donated directly to the Susan G. Komen foundation which is a much more direct way to get funds to them than just by eating yogurt.) But donating millions of dollars to breast cancer research doesn’t excuse Yoplait—or any other company— from their responsibility to produce a product that doesn’t harm consumers. My next trip to the grocery will almost surely involve a stop at the yogurt case where I will be looking for a new brand of yogurt for my family to consume that does not contain rBGH milk.