Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 09
1 McDonald's, was exactly the type of food that people were
2 trying to avoid. It was high in fat, high in saturated
3 fat, a lot of cholesterol, high in sodium and was
4 otherwise not, as I used the word, not nutritious.
5
6 The problem was that there were some products that were,
7 although not particularly good for you, at least better
8 for you than other products that the restaurants served.
9 For instance, a regular hamburger which is not what is
10 usually purchased (and is often not what is being pushed
11 in the marketing and in the advertising by the companies)
12 a regular hamburger will have, as a rule, less sodium,
13 less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat, than one
14 of the more specialised burgers, a McDLT at the time or a
15 Big Mac, which has far more of these deleterious elements
16 in it. People did wish to be able to make knowing choices
17 about their products. We were trying to make it possible
18 for them do so.
19
20 Q. As far as you were aware, was this sort of information
21 generally available?
22 A. It was, in my opinion, not available at all.
23 I understand that McDonald's says that those brochures
24 were available at their company headquarters should anyone
25 care to ask. The problem there is that you have to know
26 something exists before you can ask for it. It is also
27 possible that McDonald's had a hundred dollar bill under a
28 rock in front of its corporate headquarters that anybody
29 could have if they asked about it as well, but if they did
30 not tell people that money would never go away. Nor if
31 they do not tell people will people have the information
32 necessary in that instance even to ask for the nutritional
33 information.
34
35 Beyond that, it is a simple fact of consumer behaviour
36 that the more obstacles you place in the way of people
37 gaining information, the more difficult and significantly
38 unlikely it is that they will, in fact, obtain that
39 information. I will grant that American consumers, and
40 consumers in general, probably ought to obtain this
41 information, but the reason they are going to a fastfood
42 restaurant is to make their life simpler, not more
43 complex. So, in my opinion, that information was not
44 available to consumers at all.
45
46 Q. Right. In your investigations with the other Attorneys
47 General, what did you think about the failure to disclose
48 this information?
49 A. Given that this information was not available, we
50 looked at our laws as well as the federal food and drug
51 laws -- I should add that I neglected to say in discussing
52 my qualifications that at the time, and for some time
53 before that, at the time I left the Attorney Generals
54 office I had been cross-designated as an official with our
55 food and drug administration as well.
56
57 So, I am familiar with the federal food and drug laws as
58 well as state food and drug laws and state consumer
59 protection laws. We looked at all of those. We
60 determined that first the failure to disclose ingredients
