Lick cancer, not lids

They make the answer fairly simple by asking people to do so in the name of a good cause. \nFor the past six years, Yoplait's "Save Lids to Save Lives" campaign has invited the public to battle breast cancer by licking and saving their pink yogurt lids. For every lid that is sent back to the company, Yoplait will give 10 cents to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, promising the organization up to $2 million after a guaranteed donation of $830,000. \nYoplait can be commended for offering the Foundation such a generous sum. But much like the sour aluminum it solicits, the "Save Lids" program stinks.\nThe Yoplait Web site claims to be your "partner" in the fight against breast cancer. But what is your role in the partnership supposed to be? Mailing Yoplait a little piece of yogurt receptacle does nothing to help them raise funds. Your job, apparently, is to beg them to use money they already have. \nThis leads us to consider a disturbing inverse of "Save Lids to Save Lives."\nDon't save lids and you won't save lives. Don't give us the lids and we won't make the donation. Don't complete the arbitrary act of mailing us a pink proof-of-purchase, and you can forget about protecting the health of your mothers, wives and sisters. \nIs this what Yoplait dares to threaten?\nAs obnoxious as cashing in on customer sympathy is, the campaign would be relatively harmless if all it did was raise a little money and sell a little yogurt. A donation is generally good no matter what the motivation. However, the program encourages a certain misguided effort among people in the community. Media coverage suggests that Sunday school classes, soccer teams, offices and the like are embracing the campaign and scrambling to eat yogurt and collect lids. It's great that people are interested in getting involved. But it's likely these groups could have done much more good had they spent their time and energy on more focused effort. After all, how much yogurt can a person consume? Even if a participant ate two containers a day for a month, they would only generate $6.20 worth of pink lids. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just send a check directly to the foundation?\nBreast Cancer Action, a membership organization dedicated to ending the breast cancer epidemic, criticizes marketing schemes that capitalize on the disease. Their counter-campaign, "Think Before You Pink," asks consumers to consider how much money a company actually donates to a cause and whether it really benefits women with, or at risk for, breast cancer. Their Web site, thinkbeforeyoupink.org, offers ways to contribute to organizations directly and warns that "as long as consumers think they're doing something meaningful about breast cancer by participating in cause-related marketing campaigns, the real work that needs to be done around treatment, access to care, and true prevention will continue to be under-funded and ignored."\nIf "Save Lids to Save Lives" inspires a person who would not have otherwise participated in the fight against breast cancer, then perhaps the campaign was not initiated in vain. But slurping and saving the caps of our dairy products is the least we can do. Just two weeks ago