Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 50
1 Ms. Steel wants to ask you, is to what extent, if at all,
2 as the writer of that letter comes to the three matters
3 which you have raised, you disagree with his answer, do
4 you see?
5 A. Yes, your Lordship. I would be happy to address
6 that. That would be, I think, the only thing I would care
7 to add, but I need to refer to my letter because I frankly
8 do not trust McDonald's recounting of it.
9
10 MS. STEEL: Have you got your letter?
11 A. Yes, I do. I justly do not trust it. On page 159
12 McDonald's says that we object to the statement that
13 sodium is down across the menu on the grounds that sodium
14 is not down on all of McDonald's products. In Exhibit 7
15 to my statement I did not say that or, in fact, this was
16 Attorney General Mattox did not say that; we merely said
17 that the statement that sodium was down across the menu
18 was not true. McDonald's response was to defend one
19 untrue statement with another untrue statement. They
20 mischaracterised what we had written to them in an attempt
21 to defend what they had told the American public, in other
22 words, it is not true what is recited in there that we
23 gave as grounds for our objection that sodium was not down
24 on all of their products.
25
26 As I have told the court, we presumed that, in fact, it
27 was down in the pickles and in the sausage, but it was
28 down to an insignificant degree, if at all, in most of
29 their products and because the statement "down across the
30 menu" does not necessarily mean every item, but it does
31 mean all, virtually every item across the menu; not
32 hopping and skipping across the menu board blanding 2, 3,
33 4, 5 times and then getting on, off of the menu.
34
35 There are some consumers who would reasonably interpret
36 "across the menu" to mean all of the products. In a
37 corollary situation, when I was with the New York Attorney
38 General's office, we investigated and prosecuted a number
39 of soft drink manufacturers for promoting their products
40 when they had added NutraSweet to them, to the diet
41 products as now with NutraSweet, when they still had a
42 greater proportion of saccharine in the product. The
43 problem there was that saying "now with NutraSweet"
44 conveyed to the public, and in that case we had the
45 company's own survey data and competitive data to back us
46 up, conveyed that "now with NutraSweet" meant no longer
47 with saccharine. Here in similar vein, although we do not
48 have consumer perception data, it is my conclusion that
49 saying that sodium was down across menu was intended to
50 convey, and did convey, the consumer perception that all
51 or virtually all of the products had had their sodium
52 reduced. The truth and was significantly to the contrary.
53
54 Q. If we can move on to the milk shake advertisement. I do
55 not know if there is anything you want to say?
56 A. Yes. Looking first at the ads, the ads says: "Milk
57 and what else? Glad you asked. No artificial
58 preservatives for starters". Then it goes on to list what
59 it does say is in there. Although McDonald's takes the
60 position that sodium hetametaphosphate is a stabilizer,
