You can't take it with you....

[pax]

Legality aside, shipping cheese in your suitcase can be an extremely stinky experience if your bags should go astray. My sister tried to bring Edam home from (Dutch) Aruba through ...jeez, I think it must have been Puerto Rico but it might have been Miami. Anyway, the airline lost her suitcase and a few weeks later when they delivered it to the front door, she had to throw everything, suitcase and all it's contents, in the rubbish. Reeked to high heaven.

[Kent Wang]

Wall Street Journal article about US producers smuggling in charcuterie from Europe for research purposes.

Has anyone ever been fined for smuggling? It seems like you just get it confiscated. Maybe after you get a warning (like Creminelli in the article did) and you get caught again.

[Ravac]

My wife, bless her, smuggled home for me about 3 pounds of assorted cured meat and a few cheeses from Italy last year on a trip she chaperoned for her school. All the little shopkeepers in Italy assured her that bringing cured meat back to the US was no problem as long as it was vacuum-packed. So she merrily bought little samples of local charcuterie in most of the towns the tour bus stopped at for the night. Only on the flight home, when she read the customs form, did she realize that "no meat products" meant exactly that and that the shopkeepers had been telling her how she could get it back home. Her solution? Surround herself with 12 cranky, sweaty teen-aged girls as she walked by the drug-sniffing dog through customs on a late Saturday afternoon.

[hsm]

We got a hand-carried, properly-wrapped kilo of fresh pecorino from Pienza through customs a few years ago.

Otoh, in '08, the security team at CDG reminded me about jam being liquid as they confiscated a large jar of peach-vanilla preserves. I didn't notice it going into any bin, however, so perhaps M. and Madame had a lovely breakfast the next morning. C'est le confiture.

Edited February 8, 2010 by hsm (log)

[melamed]

I once smuggled a banana from Thailand into New Zealand by accident. I spent the night scrubbing my hiking boats

to make sure I had nothing on them but had completely forgotten about the banana. At the airport I was sniffed out by a large German Shepard and surrounded by NZ police who told me to empty the contents of my carry-on, I felt like a drug smuggler.

In another incident, had a major delay when the scans detected what looked like a bomb- a bottle of maple syrup.