Day 299 - 13 Nov 96 - Page 07
1
2 MR. RAMPTON: The objection is the one, my Lord, that your
3 Lordship has just identified. It is to the deliberate
4 deceit, the deliberate disguising of poor quality and at
5 worst poisonous food by the use of seductive advertisement
6 and gimmicks, et cetera.
7
8 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You see, I do not think there is really any
9 dispute about what actually goes on in the stores, and
10 there is nothing defamatory in saying that goes on, in my
11 mind, because people are perfectly entitled to give away
12 stuff if they want. It is the alleged motive which is the
13 defamatory bit. I have to look into whether the sting of
14 the leaflet is basically justified in relation to that.
15
16 But what I suggest is, you follow your own course because
17 when you have gone through the exercise you are going
18 through now, as you said, you are going to come to what at
19 the moment I see is the sting, which, in one way or
20 another, is exploiting, using, children in an
21 unconscionable way in order to keep their profits up in an
22 unconscionable way so far as marketing of one kind or
23 another is concerned. McDonald's deny that. You have got
24 quite a lot of material to that end. Whether it wins the
25 day for you at the end of the day, you will have to wait
26 and see.
27
28 If it helps you, of all the aspects in the case, I have
29 done quite a lot of work on this. I think I am pretty well
30 on top of the evidence. What I want to make sure, by you
31 pointing at this point or that point, is that, although
32 I think I may be on top of it, I have not missed something
33 which is important to you.
34
35 MS. STEEL: Right. Well, just on the subject, while we are
36 here, of the use of chemicals, and so on, to dress up the
37 food in order to dress up low quality food in order to sell
38 more of it, it was admitted by McDonald's on 15th December
39 1993 that McDonald's pride themselves on the uniformity of
40 their products throughout the world and that in order to
41 achieve that uniformity they have set formula and
42 specifications for menu items and use a number of additives
43 in the preparation of their food.
44
45 I mean, in terms of whether or not the food is low quality
46 there are really two aspects. One is the nutritional
47 aspect, which has really been covered by the nutritional
48 side of the case, which is that the food is high in fat,
49 sodium and sugar, and low in fibre, vitamins and minerals
50 and therefore can be deemed to be low quality in terms of
51 nutritional value.
52
53 The second aspect is more of a comment aspect, which is
54 that it is a commonly perceived opinion, for example, that
55 the meat that goes into hamburgers is low quality meat, and
56 we have heard from the Plaintiffs' own witnesses that it is
57 the cheap cuts. Also, there is a perception amongst
58 probably quite a sizeable part of the population that the
59 sort of food that McDonald's sells is junk food and that
60 junk food is what people would view as low quality food.
