Thank God for the food!
This pious exclamation comes from reverend Nils Lidskog of St. Clara parish in Stockholm’s downtown. He has just been told that the church is about to receive 5 tons of lasagne.
Remember the European horse meat scandal a few weeks ago? The content of beef in frozen and canned food from several providers was found to be fraudulent – DNA analysis showed that the beef was in fact horse meat. Tons of food had to be removed from stores all over Europe, only to be disposed of.
One of the distributors that encountered this problem is Axfood, a major grocery wholesaler in Sweden.
In practise, the problem consisted of 5,000 kg frozen lasagne that couldn’t be sold. The lasagne was produced in Luxembourg, but the producer – who claims to be in good faith, having bought what they believed was prime beef – does not want to have the lot sent back. So what to do? Someone recalled having seen food being handed out to homeless people near the church of St. Clara.
Axfood contacted Livsmedelsverket – the Swedish equivalent to FDA (without the drug part) – and asked if giving away the whole lot to people in need could be permitted. The answer was positive: Livsmedelsverket had no objections against the idea, provided that the outer packaging (with the false list of ingredients) was removed, and every item must be provided with a correct list of ingredients.
(Meat from horses is in fact an excellent nutrient with even better nutritional value than beef. The sparse presence of horse meat in human food is believed to be entirely habitual, originating from ecclesiatical interdiction and superstition.)
Picture from dagensarena.se
At Axfood, people are now cutting off the outer wrapping from some 15,000 packages of frozen lasagne, replacing it with a new list of ingredients. The lasagne will then be delivered in small lots to St. Clara church, starting with the first shipment on March 22.
Reverend Lidskog is grateful for the contribution to the charity work, which among other things means that food is handed out to more than a hundred people every day.
Note: Yes, we have homeless people in Sweden. During the last decade, the number has increased by almost 100%. The number of homeless people in Sweden (pop. 9,600,000) today is estimated to be 34,000.
The city of Stockholm (pop. 1,400,000) estimates the number of homeless people in the city to about 2,900, thereof less than 500 that sleep in open air, shelters, subway stations or doorways.
In addition to these figures, there is an unknown number of hidden homeless people, often migrants from other countries in EU who haven’t been able to find a job, sleeping on friends’ couches. These usually do not fit the common perception of what a homeless person looks like, since they are healthy and able-bodied, having no mental or drug-related problems.
PS.
Reports have come in that IKEA’s meatball moratorium is coming to an end. Swedish Meatballs (DNA-tested, horse-free, made in Germany ?!) are now being distributed to IKEA’s restaurants, to be served with genuinely Swedish lingonberry jam.