MamaSci

It’s one of Canada’s most cherished holiday practices, and it may also be unwittingly robbing resources from some of Canada’s most important charities.

You’ve seen it at the office. You’ve seen it at the library. You’ve seen it at your kids’ Christmas recital. You’ve seen it championed by police, firefighters and municipal officials.

I’m talking, of course, about donating canned goods to holiday food drives.

Now don’t get me wrong. Donating to charity is a good thing, particularly during the holidays, when many charities budget for yuletide donations. But, the simple rules of economics are begging you: Give money to food banks, rather than food.

Canned goods have a particularly low rate of charitable return. They’re heavy, they’re awkward and they can be extremely difficult to fit into a family’s meal plan. Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.

That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.

Probably the worst tragedy of the inefficient food drive is holiday events and theater performances where organizers ask for canned food donations in lieu of selling tickets.

The better option, of course, is to keep selling tickets and donate the box office take to the food bank. By not doing this, these well-meaning organizers are effectively surrendering vast amounts of critically needed grocery money in exchange for heavy cardboard boxes filled with god knows what.

And then there’s the logistical nightmare when these boxes show up at the food bank’s loading dock.

Put yourself in the place of a food bank that has just accepted an anarchic 40 pound box of random food from an office fundraiser. It’s got pie filling, Kraft Dinner, beans, pumpkin and chick peas. All those food items need to be sorted, stored, inventoried and then shoehorned into the food bank’s distribution schedule.

It’s bad form to have low-income families eat nothing but creamed corn until the stocks run dry, so some items move faster than others.  

Consider the Herculean plight of the food bank warehouse manager, and it’s easy to imagine how a particularly unhelpful box of food could end up doing nothing but wasting a bunch of people’s time before it ends up shunted into a dumpster.  

All this has been known for years, and yet the practice continues. There’s a few reasons for this.

First, charities are extremely leery about telling people how to donate. Nothing alienates a good samaritan faster than watching them pull up in a cube van of donated food, only to suggest that “maybe next time they just cut a cheque.” When charities get picky, it’s human for would-be donors to think that they don’t really the need the help that bad.

Second, people don’t trust charities. Charities have particularly fragile brands, and it only takes one or two charitable scandals showing up in someone’s Facebook feed for them to start casting aspersions on our nation’s non-profits.

So, by donating a flat of condensed milk instead of $30, donors feel they are insulating themselves against any unseemly corruption.

This was something seen during the Fort McMurray fires. Many Albertans, leery of seeing monetary donations vanish down some kind of bureaucratic black hole, insisted instead on donating mountains of diapers and toiletries that got wasted..

And lastly, something that is probably the most uncomfortable fact about all this; it doesn’t feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous.

And as donations go, it’s much more satisfying to donate a minivan filled with Ragu than to send a $100 e-transfer.

Charities know this, and it’s another reason why they are so hesitant to pooh-pooh canned food drives, despite the extra logistical cost. Non-profits know that people get a buzz from loudly dropping $6 worth of cans into an office hamper, and they’re happy to channel that urge towards something good.

They also know it’s a tougher sell to convince schools and offices to merely pass the hat for the hungry, rather than big photo-worthy gestures like building towers of creamed corn.

So, if you feel your coworkers or students need something spherical and tactile in order to fire their benevolent instints, then by all means hold a food drive, and remind people to stick to the always-needed staples like peanut butter and canned fish.

But if you’re a pragmatist just looking to vanquish as much poverty as possible with your disposable income, suck it up, key in your credit card number and enter the glorious world of anonymous, non-glamourous philanthropy.  

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It wasn’t an issue of the coffee being because no fucking shit coffee is hot, but McDonald’s had over heated their water to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 121C. Not just hot, but really FUCKING hot. Your fancy Starbucks lattes are brewed to 150 degrees.

The 79 year old woman had this cup of 250F (121C) coffee between her legs when it spilled so 250F (121C) coffee spilled on her genitals

She got third degree burns…on her genitals. THIRD DEGREE.

She had to have skin grafts to repair the damage

When she sued McDonald’s, it wasn’t for millions of dollars, it was for $20,000 to cover hospital costs and court fees. 20-fucking-thousand.

It was the courts that awarded her the amount of money she got. Again, she only wanted hospital bills and court costs

McDonald’s changed their heating policy, but not before making her sign a gag order keeping her from talking about this case

9. The woman who was burned was not driving the car, she was a passenger.

10. The car was not in motion when she was burned. The car was parked so she could add cream and sugar.

When she was burned, she reached out to McDonald’s for them to cover her medical expenses. They sent her a coupon booklet as a big eff yuu.

She required skin grafts not just on her genitals but on her thighs, buttocks, and I think stomach. Like, it was a lot of skin grafts! And did you know that skin grafts don’t always take? She was very severely hurt by a product that McDonald’s knew for a FACT was dangerous.

Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.

At that point, she had medical bills of over $11,000. She was anticipating more. She didn’t have much money.She just wanted McDonald’s to pay for the damage their coffee had done so that she could get medical treatment. Seems reasonable, right?

McDonald’s countered with an offer of $800, then turned down repeated requests to settle.  

And there weren’t several people who were burned before Liebeck. It was a LOT worse than that.

During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebeck[’]s. This history documented McDonalds’ knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.

So McDonald’s knew that their coffee was burning people–in some cases, causing third-degree burns. They knew it for TEN YEARS. And they did nothing about it.

Oh, and the jury award?

The jury awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages. This amount was reduced to $160,000 because the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill. The jury also awarded Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages, which equals about two days of McDonalds’ coffee sales.

:::

The trial court subsequently reduced the punitive award to $480,000 – or three times compensatory damages – even though the judge called McDonalds’ conduct reckless, callous and willful.

So all of the jokes about how rich Liebeck got off the settlement? Nope. McDonald’s ended up not even haping to pay most of it.

Nancy Tiano says her mother was “never happy about the incident” and that “the burns and court proceedings took their toll.” During her final years, Tiano says, her mother had no quality of life. The good news is that the settlement helped to ease the end of her life by paying for a live-in nurse. 

Okay, for starters, Victoria wasn’t a sex worker. She wasn’t necessarily anti-sex worker in the manner of the time–she viewed it as a societal ill that occurred because of the inequality of women and the power structure which allowed and abused such sex work. But she very much wanted to destroy the structures that forced many women into sex work and sex trafficking.

The claims that Victoria herself was a sex worker come from two things: her supportive stance on ‘free love’, i.e. the allowance for men and women to chose their own consensual sex partners outside of marriage, and her rise to power as a millionaire New York stock broker and newspaper owner. See, men of the time refused to believe that Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee Claflin could truly be such shrewd, ambitious and forward thinking businesswomen all on their own. So they spread the rumor that the sisters got their positions and fortunes from being sugar babies basically.

She was also virulently anti-trafficking after her younger sister and business partner Tennie Claflin was kidnapped and sold into brothels by one of their business rivals. When this happened, Victoria and her husband Colonel James Blood tracked the traffickers down and retrieved Tennie at gunpoint from her captors. 

Victoria was not well liked by her fellow suffragists either because she was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage and total equality of all races. She regularly told Stanton and Anthony to go fuck themselves.

It was awesome. She was awesome.

Happy International Women’s Day! Part 1  |  Pt. 2: x, Pt. 3 x