In my case, it would be from Italy to the US. But this question can apply to anywhere to the US (or your country).
I know bringing some food back when travelling is a no-no. But, can I bring something like olive oil (bottled)? Cheese? Meat?
What are the restrictions?
Here you go: CBP Customer Service
The following are generally admissible:
There is more on the linked website.
Did they really need to say no casu martzu twice?
Certain very rare kinds of Italian cheese may require burping during transit.
Cite
Obviously @What_Exit nailed it with that cite.
Here’s a very decent rule of thumb:
Did you buy it in a supermarket-like store AND is it in first-world style factory packaging with barcodes & ingredient lists?
- Yes: Almost certainly OK.
- No: Almost certainly not OK.
I bring all sorts of interesting stuff back from outside the US almost every week. Never a problem if I follow that rule of thumb. It may be unnecessarily conservative for some corner cases like cheeses, but it works.
I’ll eat the more exotic stuff I buy while I’m there. I can’t bring back enough to make a real supply at home.
Having been to Italy, I can safely say that you can bring back a lot of hard cheese, wine (the liter or whatever the restriction is these days), olive oil, balsamic vinegar, etc…
They’re not wild about meats/salumi, soft cheeses, or things like that.
Here’s another government website about what you can and can’t bring:
Can I Bring It? - Don’t Pack a Pest! Travelers Campaign | DPI - FDACS (dontpackapest.com)
No fresh fruit and nothing viable (like seeds, unless dried).
You can learn a great deal about this by watching the TV shows involving customs and agricultural inspection at the worlds airports.
In general, anything cooked that’s not meat is okay. I bring in food all the time, and i always declare it, so i have lots of experience.
Cheese generally needs to be made from pasteurized milk (that cooked thing) but some hard aged cheeses are okay. People who sell stuff in the airport know what countries you can bring it into. People who sell stuff in supermarkets don’t, by and large.
Please DON’T try to smuggle in raw fruit or produce. A lot of really destructive agricultural pests have been imported that way. All that stuff about citrus? Yeah, nasty diseases the USDA is desperately trying to contain, mostly.
This includes fruit that may have been served to you by the cabin crew during your flight to the US. This famous case happened a few years ago:
She wasn’t deliberately trying to smuggle it - it just didn’t occur to her that she needed to declare it. But ultimately it doesn’t matter who brought it onto the plane - you or the ground crew - the issue is that it came from outside the US. I would guess airlines have special post-arrival procedures to destroy or quarantine fresh fruit that never got served to passengers during the flight.
It was shortly before or after that when I had a similar incident. I had brought an orange back from Japan, intending to eat it during the flight, but I still had it with me when we landed. When I got to customs, they started asking me what I was bringing in. I knew fruit was subject to restrictions so I pulled out the orange and asked if it was a problem, and they took it from me and said it was good that I had declared it.
A couple of years ago I was renewing my Global Entry status, and the interviewer made it a very specific point to ask me if I understood the rules about importing fruit, referencing my incident. In other words, the customs staff who took my orange had noted it in my record. I had no idea at the time that they had done that.
Bottom line, do not screw around with customs. If you’re sloppy, you can get hit with a big fine and possibly even lose privileges like TSA Pre and Global Entry. If you’re deliberately sneaky, you can end up with even bigger fines and possible jail time.
And if you “get away” with bringing in infected produce, you could significantly damage US agriculture. I think
plum pox and citrus greening were both imported somewhat recently on food that shouldn’t have gotten through customs. Plum pox is a virus that can lie dormant in seeds, and it was probably tossed peach pits that spread it.
As a California resident, all I can confirm is that fresh produce is a no-no. The number of apples my wife has had to toss in airport trash cans could feed a small town.
All the garbage that comes off an international flight goes into a special high temperature incinerator. Soda cans, water bottles, napkins, half-eaten granola bars, used kleenex, the contents of the lav trash containers, all the food scraps, any meals that were never touched by human hands, … everything.
That rule doesn’t seem to work for packaged meat products. I’ve had customs toss out my smoked meat from Montreal, and my foie gras from France. Both were fully packaged and labeled, and bought in supermarkets.
Right,
Meat cannot be imported by tourists.
It’s politics. Free trade agreements are supposed to mean that Canadian products can be sold in American markets. But American beef producers didn’t like having to compete with Canadian beef producers.
But there was a legal exception to free trade; a government could ban a product from another country if it could cite a health concern. So when mad cow disease was getting attention, as soon as the first cases were reported in Canada, the United States banned all Canadian beef even though there was no evidence that the problem was worse in Canada than it was in America. That ban is still in effect a couple of decades later. It’s hard to argue this is due to any legitimate health concerns.
What’s the health risk in cooked sausage from Denmark?
It’s worse than that. One thing the USDA came up with was that every cow had to be tracked from birth, and if it was not completely USA the meat could not be labelled "“Product of USA”. This would require keeping imported cattle segregated all the way to and through the meat processing. There’s a very large market shipping younger cows (and pigs?) to the USA from Canada so that when they’re ready to be slaughtered, they are closer to the main processing and markets. Cattle producers found this a convenient way to cut out the competion from Canadian breeders.
I don’t recall reading how this was eventually resolved.
This is how regulations are twisted to benefit local producers. OTOH, there is a serious reason to exclude produce or meat from other ecosystems - just with the long border between Canada and USa, with the essentially same climate on each side of it, trying to limit the spread of pests and diseases is pretty much a losing proposition. it’s more prominent geographical barriers that do the job -somewhat, like the mountains for California. (And unlike USA, Canada has less worry about tropical diseases atttacking its crops.)
Can prions (mad cow disease) survive cooking/processing? (really asking)
Also, no idea if Denmark had/has a problem with that and, assuming there is no real health issue, I’d like to be able to buy meats from other places.
It seems most of the restrictions are just a pretense used to protect local producers.
Yes. Prions are heat-stable. That’s a real concern, although the incidence of mad cow is similar between the US and Canada, and cows are moved across the border, so the restriction on Canadian beef in the US is silly.
But all meat is forbidden, at least from Europe. (Without a special licence. It is possible for merchants to import it, i believe) i assumed that was just to protect the US market or something. But i really don’t know.