Pork found in Ikea’s elk lasagne
Swedish furniture giant Ikea halted sales of elkmeat lasagnes across all its European stores after a batch tested positive for pork in a Belgian lab.
It was in late March that Belgian authorities discovered that the elk mince, produced by Swedish food manufacturer Familjen Dafgård and sold at Ikea stores, contained a bit over 1 percent pork, which is the limit for contamination of meat products.
An estimated 10,000 tonnes of lasagne stored in the furniture giant’s central warehouse and at its department stores have been blocked for sale, reported Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) on Saturday.
Ikea also withdrew a total of 17,600 packages of lasagne from its stores. All were produced at the Dafgård factory at the time the contamination is thought to have taken place.
Anders Lennartsson, head of sustainability at Ikea, told SvD that it is not yet clear how many packages of the pork-contaminate elk lasagne have been bought by customers, but he believes it’s a question of “small volumes”.
“The elkmeat lasagne production only started in January. Most products that could have traces of pork are in our warehouses and have not yet reached the department stores,” said Lennartsson.
Ikea decided to withdraw the elk lasagnes from all its European stores on the day the test results came in, but the company did not tell customers why it was doing so.
“We followed company routines,” said Lennartsson.
“Since there were still many question marks, there were no grounds for informing the public while the investigation was ongoing. Now that it has been confirmed we will see how we can best communicate this.”
Dafgård also ordered its own tests that revealed four cases where the elkmeat lasagne contained small amounts of beef or pork.
Dafgård put this down to a failure to clean the premises properly between the handling of different animals. The company said measures have been taken to ensure this is rectified.
In a letter to Sweden’s National Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket), Dafgård’s head of quality said that the company has introduced stricter routines to avoid mixing different animal species.
Ikea now plans to introduce a global standard for purchasing and processing meat products and to increase the number of supplier inspections.
Ikea has not yet decided what to do with the thousands of tonnes of elkmeat stored in its warehouses, but Lennartsson said one possibility is to re-label the packages to show they contain pork.
He said Ikea plans to inform the public about the Belgian lab find and encouraged concerned customers to get in touch.
source: http://www.thelocal.se/47168/20130406/#.UV_0kL6wqUk
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Gosh seriously cannot trust those readymade goods from the supermarket aisles. No wonder the saying goes that homemade meals are the best. Few years ago there was a big scandal in England with TESCO using horsemeat in the beef burgers!! Just keep the cheap scam tactics to yourselves you know. Without education we really would be such fools because I know that some children think that the meat they eat grows/comes from the supermarket!! Hence, it’s so important to educate the younger generation well. Thanks for the awareness in the dietary department yet again Rinpoche.
This is a scam, the solution is become a vegetarian, and this whole mess is just about meat. Elk meat or pig meat, they are meat. Thank you Rinpoche for sharing
How unprofessional.
I love many of the comments over here and I think this cross-meat contamination is just one of the lesser problems but I think the bigger problem is the fact that people in general are totally disassociated with the fact that meat actually comes from a living being.
And for us to have that meat, we must condone the killing that comes with it. This dissociation is widespread and has resulted in the fact that people in general don’t mind the massive slaughter of millions of farm animals. Actually, most people I know condone it by saying that the slaughter methods are cleaner and quicker with minimal suffering to the animals. Well, that does not make it alright. Anyway, I digress. I think that there should be bigger awareness made on the way animals are slaughtered the world over and alternative ways of food production that does not include meat should be found that would make for a more humane way of human-animal co-existence.
According to Buddhist teachings, we are to remember our connections with all form of lives. We know in our hearts that we are also connected to all animals, insects and living beings. We do not harm or cause sufferings to any of these parts of ourselves. In our habitual daily life tendency, everyone always want things to be pleasant, want everything to work for themselves no matter what happens to others. With this process, we are naturally embracing our life with a false sense of self (self-grasping/egoism). We must liberate ourselves from a very primitve prison of selfishness, and become more tender-hearted, more open, sensitive and aware, more loving, caring for others, of course also ourselves too. If this is what Ikea has to offer with pork found in their Lasagne, we must all prefer to choose to be kind to animals and go VEGETARIAN for the rest of our lives. Who knows what one will become in his next life!
I really dont know who to feel bad for… The elk, the pig or the human consuming it. The animals have to be sacrificed in order to satisfy human’s selfish need and yet have to be picky because it has pork. Either way, nobody win. On another hand, I am glad that there was minimal damage as it would not be good for people from other religion that forbid pork in their diet to consume it. Thank you for such an informative post Rinpoche!
Its funny how they had decided to put it on the market before actually running test on them. This is a result of killing animals and selling their flesh, one solution may be to just sell vegetarian products, but they too have to go through test for meat presence. Having result towards vegetarian food, they wouldn’t need to worry about whether customers are able to eat this meat or that. Thousands of lasagne being sold was produced from thousands of elks being slaughtered, really hope people would be able to reflect upon the fact living beings are killed, suffered, slaughtered and mistreated just for their human greed. This makes me only think twice about the food i eat from companies we trust. Ikea doesnt have much of a vegetarian menu but i do hope they have run test on them as wel,l for no meat present. Thanks for sharing this article Rinpoche, i hope you are well.
Meat is meat whether it is pork or elkmeat.All these animals are killed for human consumption. To have the food contaminated with pork meat is very risky as the end user could be a Jew or Muslim which is against their religion to consume meat.
Be safe, be vegetarian.
Cross-meat contamination has been a big issue in Europe for the past few months with horse meat contaminated beef in UK and France. For the average meat consumer, some pork in elk meat is probably not an issue, since pork is considered more palatable than horsemeat, though i think that it is just pedantics. It is like people who would eat steak but be disgusted by eating a dog. They are just different animals so why be so squeamish over a so-called domesticated animal? Anyway i digress.
For Jews or Muslims, having pork in one’s meat, however minuscule, is anathema to them on religious grounds. I would think that these religious groups would be up in arms against Ikea’s products in case other foodstuff was contaminated too.
As everyone else has so eloquently expressed here, the easiest way out of this worry about cross-contamination would be – go vegetarian!
Interesting. Personally, I don’t see what is wrong in having the pork meat in the elk lasagne. They’re both meat, just different animals. Both type of animals needs to be killed in order to obtain the meat, no? Just inform the customers that it contains pork and be finished with it. Lol
It this happened in Malaysia, oh boy. Are we in for a show.
Vegetarians wouldn’t have problems like this! =D we just need to worry if our veggies are organic or not. Hehe
Thank you for sharing, Rinpoche! If this article has helped me in any way, it has reinforced my choice to be a vegetarian! =)
That’s risky… Imagine it came to Malaysia and it being not Halal but unlabeled, that would be very disrespectful to the Muslims in our country.
Besides that, if there was a possibility to contaminate their meat supply with pork meat… I wonder what else is in there…
The best solution that will solve all our problems is to go vegetarian. That way we don’t have to worry what’s the content of our food as everything’s either fruits or vegetables haha!
Here is the solution to all these “scandals”, GO VEGETARIAN. Vegetarianism is a halal thing as you can’t kill any non-halal animals. Also, there would be no way to use horse meat or pork to make a head of cabbage right? So, go veg and all these meat related problems will disappear.