Day 233 - 26 03 96 - Page 26
DAY 233
HOWARD LYMAN, Examined:
1 meet their contracts. Ground beef in bulk or patty form is
2 impossible to trace to the original carcass. My experience
3 has shown me that unless you have purchased the animal,
4 slaughtered it and processed it yourself, the country of
5 origin could be in doubt.
6
7 "During the E.Coli outbreak in the United States fast food
8 hamburgers, even the government could not track the origin
9 of all the meat that was used in the ground beef. The
10 industry is not geared to track all supplies, and a flat
11 statement that no product was sourced in a specific country
12 would be almost impossible to prove."
13
14 I just have a couple of questions. You would verify what I
15 have read out from your statement?
16 A. Yes.
17
18 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That, again, is Jack-in-the-box, the -----
19 A. That is correct.
20
21 MR. MORRIS: When you said that they would source product from
22 wherever they could in order to meet their contracts, could
23 you just explain, from your own experience, what actually
24 happens in the industry, in reality?
25 A. What happens in the industry is that processors will
26 have contracts, and the contracts will state fat content,
27 size of patties, things like that. When it is under
28 production -- and remember that when you go into processing
29 plants, most of the employees are not over educated, and
30 many of them with fourth, fifth grade educations -- their
31 job is basically to take product, put it into the grinders,
32 grind it up and take out the product. When they would get
33 to a point that they were out of basic product to go into
34 the grinders, they would be on the phone calling anybody
35 that they could get the product from; and I saw that many
36 processors covered each other in the industry, and it was
37 not unusual for one to transfer meat back and forth to meet
38 pressing contracts. It was done all of the time. Much of
39 that product, it would have been impossible to determine
40 where it came from.
41
42 Q. If a process plant uses some imported beef but has a
43 specification for another supplier not to use imported
44 beef, have you any comment about that?
45 A. If a processor, in my opinion, is taking in imported
46 product and they have contracts that call for the exclusion
47 of imported products, knowing what I know about the labour
48 practices within processing plants, I would believe that it
49 would be impossible to guarantee that the type of employees
50 that they would have would always have that product
51 segregated. I would believe that that would be the
52 furthest stretch of imagination I could imagine.
53
54 Q. We have seen in this case -- and Mr. Rampton may indeed put
55 it to you, I do not know -- that McDonald's specifications
56 have included the phrase -- for their processing companies,
57 of which they had over 150 before the mid 1980s and got
58 that down to five by the mid 1980s -- they had a
59 specification saying "no imported beef". Have you got any
60 comment on that?
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