Day 294 - 05 Nov 96 - Page 20
1
2 Robert Beavers - this is where it came from, his
3 questioning - said the company was "maybe 99.8 percent"
4 sure that their temperature was safe and believed that it
5 had been raised a degree or two following the deaths of two
6 customers at Jack in the Box a couple of years previously
7 in a similar incident to the 1982 McDonald's one in the
8 USA, and he admitted that this event, that Jack in the Box
9 incident, had "heightened the awareness of everyone in the
10 industry", and agreed that the US government was concerned
11 about internal temperatures of cooked burgers and
12 considering introducing regulations if necessary. So what
13 I am saying is, not only that the system is fragile, but
14 that it is flawed in fundamental respects.
15
16 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
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18 MR. MORRIS: And that, as we have heard over the years, the
19 internal minimum temperatures have been increased, I think
20 it was three times in the UK, in the last 10 years or so,
21 and that the further you go back, the greater the degree of
22 risk or the more flawed the system was. McDonald's are
23 clearly sacrificing safety concerns in order to maintain or
24 create a speedy product. There is absolutely no reason why
25 they cannot cook a burger, for example, for a longer period
26 of time at such a temperature to be absolutely sure that
27 contamination or such contamination that can be killed by
28 cooking is indeed killed, and that workers have plenty of
29 time to be able to concentrate and, as we have heard in
30 this case, the reality is very different in terms of the
31 -----
32
33 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Are you saying that that is conscious or
34 deliberate?
35
36 MR. MORRIS: I don't think they want to make -----
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Let me just finish. The trouble I have with
39 that is that one of your big points is that McDonald's
40 sacrifice everything for a profitable business or sacrifice
41 a lot of things for a profitable business, and I would have
42 thought that one thing which would make their business
43 unprofitable in no time at all was that if they did not
44 take care over the safety of their food.
45
46 Now, I can see that you might say, "Oh well, they have
47 overlooked this or they have overlooked that and in fact it
48 provides a risk", but where I have great difficulty is with
49 anything which might suggest that they are knowingly taking
50 a risk just to produce food more quickly, because I would
51 have thought the one thing that you cannot accuse
52 McDonald's of is being bad business people, and I would
53 have thought that would be extremely bad business.
54
55 MR. MORRIS: I think there are two questions there. I think
56 that it was a bit like with the cruelty to animals. When I
57 first expressed it, it was like -- when I said it was
58 deliberate policy, I did not mean that they deliberately
59 want to be cruel to animals, but the cruelty is inevitable
60 as a result of the need, you know, the institutionalised
