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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> The Department of Agriculture prohibits travelers from bringing most pork products into the U.S. because they can carry maladies such as foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever.

I wonder what this actually looks like in practice? Is this a real risk or "we've always done it this way"? Do different non-US countries have different risk profiles?

The customs people took a chunk of prosciutto my parents brought back to the US that my Italian in-laws had given them. What a waste. And Italy takes its food very seriously and professionally. I'd even go so far as to say that it's mostly higher quality than in the US in many ways.

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At least for Australia and New Zealand, who are probably the most biosec paranoid countries, there are a large number of reasons. mostly do to with introduction of pests and other potentially ecologically damaging effects, see introduction of cane toads. Those pests can be anything from viruses to mites (see current bee crises) through to domestic animals. Part of this paranoia comes from the evolutional isolation, and part of it comes from the fact that they are islands, and so it is feasible to implement measures to block the importation of foreign materials.

Food, unless it has been thoroughly cooked or cured, is a risk and the diversity of stuff people bring back is enormous. Obviously Australia and New Zealand import food, but that requires licences and is regulated and inspected.

I would have thought that land border inspections would be less paranoid about food provided that the neighbouring country has similar regulations. But I guess that better describes e.g. mainland EU borders or the US-Canada border rather than the US-Mexico border.

Humans are funny. After having caused Australia’s Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, we now have decided to be in charge.

Same with the US and immigration..

And yes, of course it is more complicated than that but I cannot forgo of the irony of our existence.

I hope we really are learning from our past mistakes. The US tries to stop all kinds of foods from crossing the border including fruits and vegetables because of what other problems they might bring. I don't have any problem with the bologna being included. Seems like there's a market for it though, so local sources should increase and grow more popular.

The US-Canada border has the same restrictions. You can't bring many fresh foods over the border even if you're actually reimporting a product produced in the same country.

The risks are very real. The US pork industry is substantial in scale, and because of a combination of geographic isolation and legal measures like this, has managed to keep several nasty pathogens out.

Remember when Bill Gates was going around about 2 decades ago, warning everyone of the risk of a global pandemic? The specific scenario/simulation his foundation used as an example was a mutation of swine flu emerging in rural Brazil then making the leap to the global food system via the US.

I get its frustrating not to be able to take stuff home. I gained a dozen pounds of water bloat I ate so much charcuterie in Tuscany. But the bottom line of these laws is that the health of the industry as a whole matters more than us individuals enjoying what's ultimately a luxury not necessity.

Aside: I'd say Italy is a mixed bag in terms of food handling. I toured a cattle ranch and it was pretty grim. Lifelong intensive confinement seemed to be the norm. But what I would say I loved about Italy is the importance food is given in ordinary life. Sure, I'm not overly romanticizing things, people of people just order some dominos in Italy too, but I think it's fair to say there's a higher priority paid to proper food vs the US.

>Sure, I'm not overly romanticizing things, people of people just order some dominos in Italy too

I don't think very many do, given that the Italian Domino's franchise recently went bankrupt [0] having managed to open 29 of its planned 880 restaurants.

Of course, plenty of Italians eat fast food (McDonald's is reasonably successful there), just not imported American versions of Italian food.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/10/dominos-retrea...

Yeah, you're right now that I think about it.

I have a long standing personal joke about how no matter where you go in the world, you'll see Domino's delivery scooters there most likely, except in the US. I dunno why I find that so amusing but I do.

> The US pork industry is substantial in scale,

an inhumane in operation. A lot of the vulnerability to disease outbreaks animals suffering under industrial farming have is the result of the horrifying conditions they live in. I wont claim that if we treated animals better the need to regulate what enters the country wouldn't exist, but it would make outbreaks less disastrous.

I hate to break it to you, but if you want to feed 8B people, industrial agriculture is the only way.

I think it's possible to have large scale industrial agriculture while still not being needless cruel to the animals you raise. It just requires people at those corporations to give up a little bit of their profits instead of giving up their humanity

If the problem is really about "maladies", I've always though that irradiating food products at customs would be a good compromise to allow people to keep what they brought (for a nominal fee).

Maybe it isn't effective against viruses or prions.

Maybe the public perception that irradiated food becomes radioactive is to strong.

Maybe the problem is actually about protecting domestic industry...

It is ineffective against prions, and not very effective against virus. But also, irradiating food is a complex process that depends on expensive machinery. It's not something that customs can do in a rush.

I think lot of countries have restrictions like this to prevent foreign pests and diseases from coming in. Right now California is dealing with cockroaches from Turkestan and Florida with African snails. Its easy for pests to spread when there is no native predators. California also does further pest inspections if you enter by roads.

A vacuum sealed chunk of prosciutto is different than a crate of bananas or live fish or something.

I've read after Brexit truck drivers traveling from UK to EU can no longer bring sandwiches with them. So even EU has those rules.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55622331

Probably to the benefit of sandwich shops just on the other side of customs or some such.

I don't believe it has to do with X country takes food more seriously. I do believe it has to do with labelling at some point, say something that is labelled from X country but is coming in from Y country. The person bringing it in from Y country will argue the label is true and that it is from X country but it just costs less in Y country. But, how can border agents guarantee that it is what the label says it is? They can't. Same thing with that prosciutto, you say it is Italian made but there is no way border agents can honestly guarantee that it is and that any possible bugs/bacteria/etc aren't in it. Also, I believe that it is the whole transport of such meat/agriculture products. Things like temperatures, packaging, labelling, etc are important when it comes to food safety. Something that is deemed unfit for human consumption may get a pass elsewhere. I'm pretty sure it is an 80% of the stuff out there is safe but 20% is unsafe so customs just tackles all 100% as unsafe to prevent mistakes.

The US is extremely lax compared to NZ's biosafety laws.

The risk is low, but the upside is essentially zero (from the point of view of customs)

From the point of view of customs, there is no upside to allowing people to bring anything through. So, that doesn't really explain why this is different from other things that are allowed.

>there is no upside to allowing people to bring anything through. So, that doesn't really explain why this is different from other things that are allowed.

The difference is the potential downside of some things as compared to other things. It's all about balancing risk.

If you only flagged items that are actually dangerous you wouldn't have the opportunity to flex your authority as often.

Do you want to be the head of the department that "saves American lives by preventing the import of contraband" a million times a year, or a thousand times a year? Who do you think gets more funding?

I think it's funny that you think Customs and Border Patrol agents have to justify their work at all. There were literal TV shows making them out to be the saviors of America.

They also don't need any excuse to flex their authority, they've been given broad ability to violate rights with very few specific requirements. Remember, these are the same people who can legally deny you entry to the US if you don't show them your facebook profile if you aren't a US citizen.

You can't bring any Citrus either in the US (lemon, grapefruit, oranges...)

One of the problems for meat was also that people would bring homemade goods inside commercial containers, or bring wild animal meat...

My understanding of this, and this is also something that is enforced at certain us state borders as well, is this is primarily about insect and other parasites that may be on/in the fruit (or their eggs). I remember having to toss a bunch of fruit at the california border a few years back.

> because they can carry maladies such as foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever

sounds more like it's related to tariffs and whatnot, bologna is cooked, so there's no risk of spreading germs.

>so there's no risk of spreading germs.

This is not true. Prion diseases can for sure survive cooking.

Foot and mouth can too I believe.

> Prion diseases can for sure survive cooking.

but it's not found in the cuts used to make Bologna...

And BTW it's been heavily controlled and it was mostly a domestic threat spread in living animals through their food supply.

Hand foot and mouth disease is usually not lethal and it spreads through close personal contact. If they wanted to block it at the border, they should block the people, not the food.

My understanding is that Bologna is a bit like hotdogs, pretty much made out of whatever left over scraps they can find.

still pork meat, not related to prion.

coppa di testa [1] is made with srcaps from pork head, it was never involved in the ban regarding the "mad cow" disease

[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_di_testa

once it goes through one of those machines that fully strips the bones you have no idea what its made out of.

once you start assuming that anything can end up in anything, everything can be depicted as dangerous.

do you really know what's inside fruit, vegetable, salad, juices, sodas etc?

do you really know what's inside domestic bologna sold and produced inside USA?

why imported one (main topic of the discussion) should be more dangerous, given that US are one of the worst places in the west for food handling?

I would assume the contrary, when in the US imported food is of better quality in general. And I am willing to spend to 2x or 3x cap to buy real Italian prosciutto from real Italian people than eat cheap, but US made ham.

p.s. my family home made cured meats for generations, we know exactly what they are made out of, what we put in it. Simple as that.

I mean I mostly agree with you, Guanciale is always going to be pork jowl. But cured sausages... a little less specific generally in terms of what primals/cuts you might source from... and at least in america where the primary touchpoint for bologna is oscar myer .. at that point it's more 'big hotdog' than anything.

I can imagine some very plausible pathways whereby some amount of lunch meat ends up eaten by pigs.

I would also wager you are far too confident that central nerves aren't ending up in the chubs.

Pork is not implicated in prion disease, according to NIAID. [0] It might make sense to suspect any particular bologna could contain other meats, but as TFA explains Mexican bologna tastes better because it doesn't contain beef (or presumably, venison.)

[0] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/prion-research

> Is this a real risk or "we've always done it this way"?

I assume the risk assessment assumes some percentage of sick pigs are contained within each. In the US, this percentage is tracked. From another country, the upper, and probably very realistic, bound is 100%. Think small, unvaccinated farm, or one that slaughters sick pigs because they need the money. It would be interesting to see their math.

Swine fever just recently has a vaccine. I doubt many US pigs are vaccinated: https://www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-african-...

It's not so much about Italy's food regulations but rather the fact that individual travellers are not certified importer entities thus there is no reasonable way to assure the piece of prosciutto your parents bought was actually produced in strict compliance with American & Italian laws.

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