Day 308 - 28 Nov 96 - Page 12
1 considers that McDonald's each day is serving food and
2 drink to approximately three-quarters of a million people
3 in the UK, it does not take a genius to conclude that our
4 packaging will be prevalent on the streets whilst littering
5 continues."
6
7 Three: That they know their food is not nutritious. You
8 can get that from the 1986 memo, which says that McDonald's
9 do not sell nutrition and people do not come to McDonald's
10 for nutrition.
11
12 They know that a high fat/low fibre, et cetera, diet is
13 linked to heart disease and cancer. That is recognised in
14 "Good Food Nutrition and McDonald's".
15
16 Four: They know that there is a massive advertising budget
17 targeting children with advertising. There are the
18 admissions in the Operations Manuals about the use of
19 ronald mcdonald, and there is the fact that, by their own
20 admission, when they start in a region they target children
21 in particular; and there are their own documents referring
22 to pester power.
23
24 Five: They know, for example, that chickens at Sun Valley
25 Poultry and, by their own admission, Osters, are kept in
26 windowless sheds with no access to fresh air or sunshine --
27 the open air or sunshine.
28
29 Six: They know that minced beef and chicken carry the
30 greatest risk of food poisoning. They know that a
31 considerable percentage of the chicken used by them carries
32 the salmonella organism, and that it is not uncommon for
33 mistakes to be made in the cooking procedures. They also
34 know that they were responsible for the outbreak of food
35 poisoning from E.Coli in Preston in 1991, and that people
36 were hospitalised as a result.
37
38 Seven: They also know that they pay at or near the minimum
39 wage, and that people who work at McDonald's are working in
40 a hot, smelly and noisy environment. They also know that
41 they are hostile to trade unions, as is shown -- I mean,
42 apart from their own evidence, obviously -- as is shown in
43 page 397 of John Love's book Behind the Arches, which they
44 authorised and which they promote.
45
46 In terms of answer number 3, I just say in terms of answer
47 number 3 that if they did not know all these things before
48 the trial -- and we would say, quite plainly, they did --
49 they certainly knew them once the witness statements,
50 et cetera, had been served.
51
52 So, if (which we do not believe for one moment) they, for
53 some inexplicable reason, were still not conscious of the
54 truth of the leaflets, they certainly -- actually, this is
55 a separate point.
56
57 So, there is the first point that they certainly must have
58 known it by the time we served the witness statements and
59 all the documents, and that they had served their own; they
60 had to know all those things.
