Day 001 - 28 Jun 94 - Page 43
1 status of the operations at Sun Valley, GD Bowes, Midland
Meat Packers and McKey Foods.
2
As your Lordship will know, if your Lordship has already
3 had a chance to look at them, their reports confirm the
high standards of hygiene are maintained at all these
4 establishments.
5 In addition, of course, there is this consideration: In
most countries of the world the production of food for
6 human consumption is subject to strict government
regulation and independent inspectors are in attendance
7 and make regular visits to each establishment which plays
a part in the process, that is to say, abattoir,
8 processing plant and restaurants.
9 The result of all that is this, the system at the end of
which McDonald's sells the food to the public, though
10 certainly not infallible, is very effective indeed. That
this is so I might illustrate by giving your Lordship some
11 numbers which are, your Lordship may feel, really quite
illuminating:
12
For the years 1986/87/88 and 1991 -- I know not yet what
13 the reason for the gap is -- the average number of visits
per year to McDonald's restaurants in the United States
14 was an astonishing 4.7 billion. Those figures were
extracted from pink bundle IV/16 at page 211. If each
15 "visit", which is the word used in that document, and
means customer transaction at the till, involves (as it is
16 thought to do) the sale of an average of two meals, so it
is two meals per visit, this means that an average of
17 about 9.5 billion -- I am using American billion, that is
to say, a thousand million -- 9.5 billion McDonald's meals
18 were eaten in the USA in each of those years.
19 It follows, my Lord, as night follows day, that if the
defendants were right and that McDonald's food carried an
20 unusual or even a significant risk of food poisoning, one
would expect over a period of, say, 20 years that the
21 defendants would be able to point to literally thousands
and thousands of cases of food poisoning. Yet, in the
22 event, as your Lordship knows, what can they prove, they
can show that in the US1A there was one outbreak of food
23 poisoning attributable to McDonald's food in 1982 and one
in 1987. This, the last one, in fact, had nothing to do
24 with minced beef or chicken. It came about because a crew
member (unknown to herself or her employers) happened to
25 be a typhoid carrier and so contaminated some shrimps.
26 In the United Kingdom, the position is similar. As your
Lordship knows, McDonald's was not established here until
27 1974 but it has grown rapidly. It now has 521 restaurants
throughout the United Kingdom. The number of meals eaten
28 annually is obviously nothing like as great as in the USA
where there are over 9,000 restaurants. But it is
29 nonetheless estimated that an average of nearly 500
million meals are eaten at McDonald's in this country
30 every year.
