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.
    17
    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

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