The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

My hands are tied, and it’s making me feel rather frustrated. 

I mentioned before that Jeremy and I created a charitable organization to help connect the ranchers of our community with hungry families.  In our minds, it created a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, things have come to a screeching halt because the issue of liability was brought up by a reporter interested in doing an article in our local paper.  Rather than highlight the good we were doing, she wanted to focus on the bad: who people could sue. 

Thanks for the support, local paper!

Our organization has helped hundreds of otherwise hungry families eat nutritious food, donated by ranchers who asked for nothing in return – not even a tax write-off. 

Professionals are involved in every step of the process, to make sure only quality ground beef goes home to those families.  And yet, when a reporter starts asking those professionals about liability, people get spooked.  And families go hungry while people like me scramble to do some damage control.

It was suggested by the reporter that instead of asking local ranchers to donate meat, we’d do better to ask supermarkets, thereby putting the issue of liability on “Corporate America”.

Well, listen here.  That is not the point. 

The point is that we are a community, taking care of our own.

Supermarkets cannot donate hundreds of pounds of beef in one go.  They are working for a profit.  Ranchers, though?  They can donate a quarter of a steer and not blink an eye.

Your average steer weighs about 1500 pounds.  Subtract about 30% of that for bone and, um… the stuff that goes into “hot dogs” and you’ve got 1050 pounds.  A quarter of that is 262.5 pounds of ground beef.

Do you know how many mouths that feeds?

And yet.  Our meat packer – the only one in our area that is state inspected, is spooked.  They won’t package any more “charity meat” until we can take the liability off of their hands.

Our insurance agents can’t get a liability policy for us, because the meat isn’t ours.  They say the liability lies with the packers. 

The USDA requirements for donated meat have been met – and yet, people are going hungry.

I don’t know what to do.  I have no idea how to keep things going at this point, and I don’t have any money to give to a corporate attorney.  I hope, with a little bit of research, I can solve this problem and be able to move forward.  I’ve already discovered that Idaho has dealt with this issue already. 

Has California?  If not, how can I get them to?

A part of me wishes that the people who have used our court system to become millionaires over cups of spilled coffee could see what they’ve done to the spirit of giving – they should be ashamed at the ugliness they have created.