As I arrived in Frankfurt airport this morning, there was a humorous short playing that illustrated the dangers of bringing strange meat or cheese into the EU from outside countries (with a few exceptions).
The USA has similar laws banning the import of meat and cheeses by regular folks.
Why is this? I assume that I won’t be chased by a chicken or attacked by a sausage (as occurred in the message).
I’d really like to be able to take some jamon serrano or a good wurst or frommage home. Is it even possible for a regular traveler?
My wife and I traveled to the Açores in 2000. We brought back about 35 lbs of cheese from the island of Pico. It was almost surely unpasteurized IIRC. It was not listed on the customs forms as something we needed to declare, so when we reached customs at the airport, we told the agent what we had. He could not have cared less, but did ask us if we had linguiça or chouriço (Portuguese cured pork sausages), which we did not. We went through with no problems. I know that my relatives have brought back live limpets without being confiscated.
I don’t know if things have changed, but cheeses didn’t seem to bother anyone back then.
My wife and her family are in the gourmet foods importation and distribution business in the U.S. They focus on high-end cheeses but also some meats. That industry is strictly controlled by the Federal Food and Drug Administration. There are inspection requirements and also licenses involved to regulate the number of importers of certain cheeses brought into the U.S. Even regular businesses can’t just bring cheese or meat into the country without the correct license and the licenses often cost in the 5 to 7 figure range per cheese. There are some cheeses such as the raw milk ones that are generally banned from the U.S. completely because of health concerns. I don’t know how tightly they regulate very small quantities brought in by individual tourists but you can’t bring in a lot and it would generally have to be clearly labeled to prove it isn’t a banned cheese or meat.
It’s a food quarantine matter, to prevent the import of diseases that might affect the domestic meat or cheese industry. Last time I travelled to Australia, I brought some cheese that I’d intended to eat on the journey, but hadn’t because I’d been upgraded. Of course, I declared it, and showed it to the customs guy. He let it in, because it was labelled as coming from the US, and said that they were worried about cheese from other countries.
Hasn’t the ban on raw cheese been totally lifted? All I can say is that a glory hallelujah was heard in my and my friends’ houses when the regulation was lifted, and we pigged out from large quantities bought at the stores.
No, there are still some forbidden raw milk cheeses for the U.S. market. They do exist as a gourmet foods black market of sorts but some of them are illegal. I have eaten lots of them because they get mistakenly shipped on big container ships sometimes and the FDA doesn’t inspect everything but they aren’t supposed to be sold. I think the bans on those are overly tight but there are a bunch of regulations with imported cheeses that you wouldn’t believe. The FDA can and does quarantine tens of thousands of dollars worth or perishable product at random to be inspected and they often take so long to do it that it passes its expiration date or comes really close to it and has to be destroyed even after it clears as just fine. The importer bringing it in gets nothing and has to eat the loss. They also send random inspectors to the warehouses to look for banned items.
I brought cheese from France back to the US, and it was apparently fine. At the cheese shops there, they had signs in English telling you that they could vacuum-seal the cheese and it would go through US Customs. It did, without question (I declared it as cheese on my customs declaration)
This is the part that I don’t get. If I bring back cheese, ham, sausage, etc., it would be for me to eat. How would that affect the domestic meat or cheese industry? I could understand if I was going to feed my pigs some bacon I brought back from Germany. But that’s just wrong on a couple of different levels.
Better to have a one-size-fits-all rule and be safe.
(edit: the customs forms, and import restrictions, iirc, don’t give two shits about processed foods for much of this reason. they’re making policy choices with a tradeoff between asinine hermetic sealing on a national level and basic restrictions that are the cause of most environmental issues)
another tag on: there’s also a fair bit of trade protectionism masquerading as “health and safety” regulations. hard to say (and i’m not saying) what is done for what reason, specifically - just that the end result is a lot of stupid-ish restrictions that have multiple reasons for their existence
The most recent major outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001 is thought to have been caused by illegally imported, infected meat used in pig swill.
Two things suggest themselves to me
A) You might not eat it all, you might throw some of it out and whatever micororganisms are in it are then out there in the wild, so can get into the food chain or the water table.
B) Even if you do eat it, the microorganisms in there aren’t killed just because you eat them. They can end up in the wild, too, through the auspices of the municipal water and sewage system where you live.
You have a point on the first one, but on the second, if that’s an issue, then we have the same problem when I take a salami sandwich on board and eat it during the flight. Or with the meals served on the flight, by the airline for that matter.
On the first point, I wonder what’s the actual likelihood of cross contamination in that manner. Just as importantly, it’s not as if I can’t get European stuff in the USA; I just have to pay an importer’s fees for them to bring it over and clear it. And they can’t actually check or catch every possible microbe.
The most likely “reason” seems to be that posited by Rumor_Watkins: it’s protectionism masquerading as consumer protection.