Really, KFC?
When I saw the new pink buckets of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, break something, call Congress, or make a Colonel Sanders voodoo doll (which, we all know, wouldn’t do much good, anyway). These “Buckets for the Cure” will be donating portions of their profits to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer.
Their sale, of course, will lead to breast cancer.
Most people are aware that obesity, which comes from eating lots of very fatty, nasty fried food—like the Colonel sells—leads to cancer. Multiple cancers, in fact, though breast cancer is prominently there on the list. So we’re all going to go buy a bucket of chicken… to help raise money to fight the disease we might get from eating the chicken?
I also couldn’t believe that Susan G. Komen for the Cure was behind the whole benefit! I interviewed a woman from the foundation years ago and was very impressed with what I heard. I know they’ve had a scandal or two along the way—most large companies do, whether they are for-profit or non-profit—but this is just ridiculous.
Are they actually suggesting that people raise money for them by buying fried chicken—and not just a chicken sandwich, but massive buckets of deep fried, fatty, greasy chicken? This is the same company that just launched a massively disgusting chicken sandwich without bread—a gluttonous mountain of chicken with chicken as its bread. Do you seriously think that this is going to help cure breast cancer? Would you advise women to eat this food to prevent breast cancer?
Couldn't you have partnered with, I don't know, an orange company or something? Sell some fugi apples, maybe?
Breast Cancer Action calls this action “pinkwashing.” It’s a term that means you put a pink ribbon on a product to promote its sale and make it look like it’s for the greater good of breast cancer research and awareness, but in reality the product itself is harmful. And it couldn’t get much more harmful than this, unless maybe they were selling cancer injections with little pink ribbons on them to help find a cure.
Wow, Susan G. Komen for the Cure. My mother and sister are about to walk for your benefit this June and are working hard for it only to be mocked with this garbage? Both of my grandmothers died of cancer so you could later use them as a tragic example of what can happen when we can’t cure cancer—and then promote the very same items that could have led to their deaths, and the deaths of thousands of other women? Super classy there, Susan G.
I’ll be sure to spend my breast cancer research and awareness money elsewhere—preferably with something that won’t lead to the development of cancer in my body.
