Food recalls are coming in fast and furious and it's often hard to keep track. In this series of recall round-ups we share the most up-to-date information on the foods you should be scrutinizing right now.

IKEA Meatballs
Doing a bit of shopping and snacking abroad? You might wish to grab lunch before you go to IKEA. The Swedish furniture chain has pulled 1675 pounds of meatballs from the menus of some of its in-store cafeterias across Europe after tests in the Czech Republic revealed the presence of horse meat in some samples.
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Editor's note: Roly Owers is chief executive of World Horse Welfare and a qualified veterinarian with a lifetime of involvement with horses. He is active in working with governments, sport regulators, veterinary bodies and non-profit organizations to improve horse welfare worldwide.

A welcome spotlight is now being shone on the murky trade in European horsemeat, but the public are still being left in the dark about the brutal treatment and needless suffering of the horses destined for their plates.

Every year around 65,000 horses are crammed into trucks and transported across Europe to the slaughterhouse for what can be days on end in hellish conditions.
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Nestle is suspending deliveries of all its products that include beef from a German supplier because "traces of horse DNA" were found in the meat, the Swiss-based food giant said on its website Monday.

Nestle also is recalling two chilled pasta products, Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, from store shelves in Italy and Spain, the news release said. A lasagna product sold to French catering businesses will also be recalled.
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French prosecutors are investigating how horse meat was sold as beef, the country's consumer affairs minister said Thursday.

The announcement comes as UK inspectors said that horse carcasses contaminated with an equine painkiller harmful to humans may have entered the food chain in France.

A number of meat plants that handled the horse meat as it made its way through the food chain are facing questions about what they knew and whether fraud was involved.
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Police and health officials have raided a slaughterhouse and meat company in the United Kingdom as part of an ongoing investigation into horse meat that was labeled as beef, authorities said Tuesday.

The West Yorkshire slaughterhouse is believed to have supplied horse carcasses to a firm called Farmbox Meats Ltd., which then sold the meat as beef for kebabs and burgers.
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Previously in meat-based fashion

And by the way? Anderson Cooper, eat your vegetables!

High-stakes lawsuits, overlapping investigations and a bitter battle over blame are spreading across Europe in the wake of a scandal that has rocked the meat industry.

Horse meat was discovered in products that are supposed to be 100% beef, sold in Sweden, the United Kingdom and France.
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I am no Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern. I’ve never eaten, yet alone enjoyed, Rocky Mountain oysters, and I know not the joys of feasting on fried scorpion skewered on a stick or mopane worms fresh from the ground. And for good reason – my stomach turns at the thought.

How then did I find myself willing to attend a dinner where all of the courses I’d be served featured animal blood? Your guess is as good as mine. And as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror day of practicing my "No really, I love it!" face, the butterflies in my stomach feel more like giant moths begging to get out.

As a researcher, after I volunteered for this task, I wanted some information to help ease my mind (and stomach). Primarily, I needed to know, is this normal? Is it normal to consume the blood of other animals? And if so, why did it seem so foreign to me?
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

Did pirates barbecue? Arrrrgh, of course they did, though the barbecuing may actually have come before the buccaneering.

Around 1630, the small island of Tortuga off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti) became a haven for a motley lot of vagabonds and refugees - deserters, escaped slaves, and shipwrecked sailors of all nationalities. They would sneak over to Hispaniola to hunt the wild cattle and pigs that roamed the sparsely populated coast, taking whatever they bagged back to Tortuga to avoid the local authorities.

These hunters discovered they could sell dried meat, hides, and lard to planters and ship captains, and soon they became known as “boucaniers.” The term derived from the Tupi word boucan, meaning a grate on which meat was slowly cured over a small fire. The hunters of Tortuga used such grates to dry their meat for sale and to cook feasts for themselves.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

Like everything in South Carolina, we cook barbeque cantankerously. We smoke our meat with hundreds of opinions and often with a sense of injured pride. Otherwise, it’s just different in South Carolina - all the way down to the way we spell it, more often with the garish and trashy “q” rather than the upwardly mobile and buttoned-down “c.”

When you mention S.C., people usually want to start a fight about sauces. The whole state is a big messy spill of sauces - there’s at least four of them. As anyone who's driven south on Highway 17 knows, though, that vinegar and spices blend famously found all over eastern North Carolina is really more of a culinary wedge that plunges way down the Carolina shore, down past Scott’s in Hemingway and certainly as far south as Brown’s Bar-B-Que in Kingstree and even further south with the pulled pork at Cooper’s Country Store in Salters.
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