Day 186 - 10 Nov 95 - Page 55


     
     1
     2   MR. RAMPTON:  My Lord, that helps me, as I thought it might,
     3        because once again Ms. Steel has tried to separate one part
     4        of the leaflet from the rest of it; wholly impermissible.
     5        One only needs to start with the little dollar signs in the
     6        eyes of the fat gentleman on the front cover to realise
     7        what one is being told about that.  Where does one expect
     8        to see a man's motivation but in his eyes? Dollars.  Inside
     9        one sees Mcdollars, Mcgreedy, Mcprofits.
    10
    11   MR. MORRIS:  Mr. Rampton is misrepresenting -----
    12
    13   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Listen, I am sorry, I will reread when I get
    14        the transcript.  I have taken a careful note of your
    15        submissions.  I will read the transcript in any event since
    16        I am going to get it, and you must let Mr. Rampton produce
    17        his reply.
    18
    19   MR. RAMPTON:  Mcprofits.  Then, curiously enough, in the passage
    20        of the leaflet on which the Defendants rely but we have not
    21        pleaded, the box "Everything must go", one finds this --
    22        and this is the whole range of fast food people, including,
    23        of course, in particular and principally McDonald's -- the
    24        last sentence of the first complete paragraph in the box
    25        "Everything must go":  "They are one of the worst examples
    26        of industries motivated only by profit, and geared to
    27        continual expansion."  My Lord, that being so, the whole of
    28        the misconduct alleged against McDonald's in this leaflet
    29        is governed by that consideration, which is expressed by
    30        way of summary.
    31
    32        There is one other matter I think I ought to deal with in
    33        fairness to the Defendants, and that is the submission that
    34        the nature of the distinction between food and diet is now
    35        so well known that, in effect, this I think, people reading
    36        this leaflet would have realised that what was said is a
    37        nonsense.  I cannot think of any other effect that that
    38        would have were it so.  In the first place, I do not accept
    39        that that is so well accepted in the public mind that it
    40        can be regarded as the general knowledge or everyday
    41        knowledge of the man in the street.  In the second place,
    42        even if he did have some general knowledge of, for example,
    43        the relationship between over consumption of saturated or
    44        transfatty acids -- saturated fat or transfatty acids and
    45        coronary heart disease or atherosclerosis -- in the first
    46        place he is going to see, when he reads this, that he had
    47        not appreciated how grave the risk was if he should eat
    48        McDonald's food.  In the second place he is certainly not
    49        going to know that there is asserted, as a matter of
    50        general knowledge, a causal relationship between the 
    51        consumption of that food, not for everybody who eats it, 
    52        but a causal relationship between the consumption of that 
    53        food and the onset of cancer of the breast and bowel.
    54
    55   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I think the point about consciousness of diet
    56        was really directed at the reader appreciating that there
    57        was a difference between diet and food or diet and a meal,
    58        so that it would not be treated as a schoolboy howler but,
    59        in fact, what the person would know that if anything
    60        affects your health it is diet rather than -----

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