Day 025 - 16 Sep 94 - Page 20
1 A. No, sir.
2
3 Q. Unless McDonald's put into this advertisement: "Take care
4 of this food; it may damage your health", it is always
5 going to be deceptive; is that right?
6 A. Not at all. I would point out McDonald's have many
7 advertisements and television commercials that had aired
8 prior to these and after these. These are the only ones
9 we took issue with. We are not trying to prevent
10 McDonald's from persuading people to come to their place
11 of business to eat the food. That is a matter of free
12 choice. But, in our marketplace, in our economy, it is
13 necessary for consumers, in order to be a fully
14 functioning part of that marketplace, to make their
15 purchasing decisions based on all the facts that are
16 relevant to that decision.
17
18 That is why, in part, our consumer protection laws outlaw,
19 make illegal, material non-disclosures of fact. If
20 consumers are told only the good but none of the bad about
21 the product, then they are going to be misled and they
22 will go to one business rather than a competitor. If the
23 competitor offers a better product, but does not engage in
24 deceptive advertising, that competitor will lose
25 business. Our capitalist system of economy will not
26 function right.
27
28 We must have truth in the marketplace and accuracy in the
29 marketplace and, in fact, a free flow of information in
30 the marketplace. What ads like these from McDonald's do
31 is to clog up the arteries of the marketplace to convey
32 half truths or mis-truths to the individuals in order to
33 get them to come to McDonald's rather than coming to
34 Burger King. This is largely a matter of protecting, as
35 well as consumers, protecting the competition that do not
36 engage in deceptive advertising.
37
38 Q. Talking about "clogging up the arteries", Mr. Gardner,
39 could you turn on to the advertisement -- I am afraid
40 I cannot give you a page number. My Lord, it is page 114.
41
42 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If we are leaving that for the time being,
43 can I know, Mr. Rampton, what in the States "a serving"
44 means, what in the American language "a serving" means?
45
46 MR. RAMPTON: You will have to ask the witness.
47
48 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I was leading you to. What would four
49 servings in fruits and vegetables mean? Four serving
50 spoonfuls or eating it four times a day?
51 A. It, in general, means what it says. As a common
52 sense, if you were to eat an apple, I believe an apple
53 would be one serving; not a slice of an apple. I could
54 not tell the court what a serving of lettuce would be. I
55 do not know the quantity. Our food and drug
56 administration has set forth for nutrition disclosure, not
57 recommended, but absolute serving sizes. They had to do
58 that because the food industry was artificially
59 manipulating the serving sizes in order to keep the
60 disclosed values of the negative nutrients below a certain
