IKEA’s meatballs recalled due to horse meat

IKEA’s great for lots of things, like outfitting your room with duct-taped MALM dressers that fall apart as soon as a subway train rumbles under your building, or finding a Zooey Deschanel/Joseph Gordon-Levitt lookalike and re-enacting that scene from 500 Days of Summer. One of IKEA’s worst-kept, best secrets, though, is the retailer’s super cheap food, like dollar soft-serve ice cream and sweet, saucy frozen Swedish meatballs. But while we assumed the worst thing about those meatballs was our tendency to eat a whole bag in one sitting, we might have been wrong, because traces of horse meat were reportedly found in them in the Czech Republic. NO, BLACK BEAUTY, NO!!!

Sadly, this isn’t the first time food providers have been accused of sneaking ground-up little horseys in European food. Recently,EU  authorities have found traces of horse meat in everything from Burger King burgers to frozen spaghetti Bolognese and lasagna brands. Meanwhile, IKEA says their own researchers haven’t uncovered any traces of equine meat in the meatballs, though they’ve pulled the brand from store shelves in Europe to soothe the disgusted masses.

Word of the horse scandal, if no the horse meat itself, has already hit the States, and customers have been freaking out on the company’s Facebook page all day. But don’t start tossing your meatball stash quite yet:  no horse meat has been discovered in the balls over here at the moment, so there’s a chance you’ve just been eating ground-up cows and dead piggies this whole time. Oink!