I am using Pandoc to turn my latest book, written in markdown, into Tex. On the way, Pandoc adds & (ampersand) to the one table I have in the book. So this

| Sample                    | 14 €/kg |

gets turned into this:

Sample & 14\,€/kg \\

Which, of course, creates problems during my conversion from tex to pdf further up the road.

Why does Pandoc do that? How can I stop it?
Using Pandoc to go from Markdown straight to PDF works fine