Thrifty Swedes donate horsemeat cast-offs to homeless

Horsemeat-tainted lasagne will be donated to Church kitchen

Horsemeat-tainted lasagne was found across Europe (Rex Features)

When horsemeat was discovered in foods across Europe earlier this year, everything from packets of lasagne to tins of bolognese disappeared off the shelves overnight, most of it destined for an unceremonious dumping as far away from the horrified customer as possible.

Not so in thrifty Sweden, where one retailer has announced plans to donate their stocks of horsemeat-tainted lasagne to the homeless. Axfood said in a press release that they would start distributing about five tons of lasagne to “the needy of St Clara Church in Stockholm” from tomorrow.

The group said that many people had contacted them outraged that edible food would be going to waste. While people in Britain are unaccustomed to horsemeat, it is eaten with gusto across Europe, with speciality butchers found in France, Switzerland and Belgium.

Sweden's food agency had given the go-ahead for the plan, the company said, as long as the labelling on the package made it clear exactly what the person was about to tuck into.

Axfood is not the first company to come up with an ingenious way of putting unwanted horsemeat to good use: in Germany, one company last month announced that their tainted lasagne would be turned into bio-gas.