Day 186 - 10 Nov 95 - Page 55
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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.
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11 MR. MORRIS: Mr. Rampton is misrepresenting -----
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 -----
