Well, there’s a bit of an industry for tourists: you purchase some pineapples while you’re travelling, and they’re there at the airport, waiting for you, when you depart.
We bought a 3-pack of pineapples when we visited Hawaii 30ish years back, and frankly they were delicious - far nicer than the ones I could get at the grocery store.
Smuggling food back from Italy seems to date back to the early 1950s at least :D.
(eta: ninjaed by Dewey Finn! - I tried to find the bit where she hid the cheese in a tuba but that doesn’t seem to be on Youtube)
Actually, most of the pineapples we can buy in the continental U.S. nowadays come from Costa Rica. Hawaiian ones are way tastier than those from central America.
Finding a real Hawaiian pineapple here is becoming very rare.
I tried to bring home a jar of awesome jam from the Pacific northwest recently, and it got confiscated. I thought it was solid enough to not count as a liquid, but TSA thought differently and yanked it. Into the trash with my Oregon Growers Strawberry Pinot Noir jam.
I don’t go on foreign holiday much, but a lot of my colleagues bring their home comforts with them on sun holidays to the Mediterranean etc. Irish sausages, tea bags, crisps (aka chips), sweets, etc. and everyone who goes abroad at the very least brings back biscuits or sweets, sometimes more interesting fare.
OK, I can’t promise this brand was available 30 years ago. My data is 20yo. No vacuum-packaging back then, either; a lot of places are much happier with letting someone bring cured meats when they’re vacuum-packed than not, even though the meat has been treated the same way and the information on the label is the same. I guess it looks more… professional or something? I mean, a piece of sausage with a label stuck to a bit of colored string looks much less serious than the same sausage vacuum-packaged and the label stuck to the plastic.
One of my coworkers had some patés bought at Stanstead Airport confiscated right there. She told the security agent “at least eat it! It’s good food! Argh! I can’t believe you’re throwing away good food!” That they would sell stuff in the airport and then consider it “unacceptable” offended her sense of organization, but throwing away good food offended the core of her being.
I promise I do know Ireland and the UK are different countries, but for a lot of that stuff and if they’re going to the Mediterranean Coast of Spain, they may want to check if there’s a Sainsbury’s. We have some enclaves which aren’t so much enclaves as British colonies, including the pubs, restaurants and supermarkets.
An Gadai writes: “a lot of my colleagues bring their home comforts with them on sun holidays to the Mediterranean etc. Irish sausages, tea bags, crisps (aka chips), sweets, etc., and everyone who goes abroad at the very least brings back biscuits or sweets, sometimes more interesting fare.”
Someone whom I once slightly knew, took AG’s colleagues’ practice to greater lengths. My brother’s late father-in-law: who was mostly a sweet guy, but displayed a bit of a curmudgeonly side in holding in dislike and contempt, all foreign things and places. He made just one exception: he loved the sun, and went on “tanning” holidays (solo – his wife didn’t share that liking) to various countries a good way south of Britain – including Spain. Going out on these trips, he took in his luggage, plenty of wholesome English fare such as bacon and eggs: no way was he eating any foreign muck when out there. By the same token, he wouldn’t have dreamt of bringing back any edibles from those ghastly places. (I don’t know if he ever got wise to “British colonies in Spain” – I suspect that factor would have made no difference to him; he’d have been like the old chap in the novel – “Abroad is abroad, and abroad is bloody – end-of.”)
My brother used to tease his FIL, to the effect that he ought to get a sun-lamp: which would save him great amounts of money, by doing away with his need to go on holiday to places which he loathed and had no interest in.
I actually used to work airport security many years ago (1990) and I honestly can’t remember what we used to do with confiscated wine - which there was a lot of. I do remember that confiscated items like multi-tools would sit in a box and, after a certain amount of time, we could ask to have it.
This was pre 9-11 so the rules were very different.
I may have a vague memory of one of the older guys taking wine home. You could take commercially bottled wine with you, just not homemade.
I studied in the USSR, and the ruble was a nonconvertible currency. But there was a huge black market.
One of my professors told me about a time when she was privileged enough to be allowed to go to a professional conference in Western Europe, and was given a per diem in hard currency so she could buy food. So she quite logically packed her suitcase full of non perishable food and ate that, and brought home her hard currency per diem to exchange on the black market.
How else are you going to get your Cuban rum and cigars into the country?
Seriously though; lots of people buy stuff like special foods on vacation and bring them home- either as treats for relatives, or as stuff for expats.
I mean, when I did my summer study abroad in England, I brought back a bunch of stuff for a British friend of mine who couldn’t get those particular brands/types of chocolate and pickled onions, etc… here in the US. And I brought back some beer/liquor that I’d never seen here before as well.
Other times it’s a price thing- when in Italy, it’s quite a bit cheaper to buy stuff like Parmesan/Grana Padano/Romano cheese in the grocery store there and bring it home, than to buy it here. Same stuff, but there it’s just a staple food where they sell multiple varieties of each in bulk, while here it’s a costly import.
{x} flew into Singapore still carrying “doctors box” drug. (No script). Thought about it, and decided to declare it. It was confiscated and he was released. Not something he would have done in some other countries, but Singapore had the reputation of being very ‘by the book’, and he thought that the hassle was better than the chance of being jailed. Small room with no windows was involved in the experience.
in the last few years theres been people who have died from dowing huge bottles of booze before getting on planes because customs wouldn’t let them on board or through the line home … One 70 year old guy downed something close 120 proof vodka in like a gallon or more bottle and died 45 minutes later ……
there was a more recent one where a woman tried the same thing with rum and died from a heart attack due to toxic alcohol poisoning … like the old guy
The few times I’ve dealt with US Customs, I’ve found them to be surprisingly trusting. The last time I traveled internationally, I brought back candy for the office from Germany and declared it. Customs agent asked what I had, I told him, and he never even looked up, he just stamped my form and said I was good to go. I offered to show it to him. He wasn’t interested, at all. Not that I’m complaining…
Just like the IRS and income tax returns, customs agents don’t have the resources to inspect every suitcase and package coming into the country. For most folks, they’ll trust what’s on the declaration form, unless their Spidey-sense starts tingling. For a lucky few, they get “randomly selected for further scrutiny.” They rely on the possibility of getting caught (rather than certainty) to deter most (but certainly not all) smugglers.
I just meant that plenty of people have historically bought stuff of Cuban origin while on overseas trips elsewhere and smuggled it home in their luggage.
And yeah, the Customs people are just probably looking for unusually heavy suitcases, really guilty looking people, etc… whose customs declarations are unusually sparse.
I mean, if you declare all your vacuum-packed Italian hard cheese, and your Italian wine and grappa, then it’s unlikely they’re going to be too suspicious that you’re also dragging a couple of liters of Cuban rum back with you. (not that I would know… )
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