Pink Soup?

My 16-year-old son Robin, a distance runner who is always hungry, saw the pink can of Campbell’s tomato soup on the counter and asked if he could eat it.

My reply was “no.” This can of soup is not food—it’s politics.

Andy Warhol must be spinning in his grave to see the soup can he made into a cultural icon swathed in sickly pink and adorned with the ubiquitous ribbon. Or maybe he's laughing--Warhol was a man who could appreciate the absurd.

The label says, “Your purchase of this can will help Campbell make a donation in support of breast cancer awareness. Together we can make a difference.”

Even for pink ribbon marketing, this is incredibly lame. How much money is Campbell donating, and to what organization(s)? The label doesn’t say. I’ll be giving the Campbell’s PR folks a call tomorrow.

Comments

[Mark]

Part of the problem is also akin to the laetrile problem. It's not that latetrile was harmful, it's that people seeking alternative treatments that don't work are delaying treatments that might work in addition to wasting valuable money.

Similarly, if one believes that if we just had enough money we'd have the cancer problem licked, the appropriate thing to do is not to qwell your outrage by buying pink stuff but to express your outrage in letters to Congress, or visiting your Congressperson, or doing something actually constructive and effective that might lead to solving the problem and not just plaster pink everywhere. So pink is really a diversion.

That said, it would be nice to have the actual figures of how much money is raised by groups, what the overhead is, what profits are, where the money went, etc., etc.

[Bionda]

You're really making me rethink all the pink marketing this month. It used to make me happy to see that stores are embracing such a good cause, but now I'm just angry at the dismal percentage of proceeds actually going to that cause.