Why Can't I Take an Orange Through Customs? | Hacker News Reader

Why Can't I Take an Orange Through Customs?

priceonomics.com

108 pointsgordon_freeman82 comments

I once had a fun experience. I was return to the U.S. after a stay in South Korea. My hosts gave me a box of grapes as a going away gift, I figured I'd eat them on the plane.

Short story, I didn't. And I didn't throw them away. Customs asked me if I had any fruits, I told them yes I had grapes. They looked at each other and then looked at me.

"Sir, we're going to have to see these grapes"

"okay, if I'm not allowed to bring them in I can just toss 'em"

quiet stare down while the other customs officer inspected my grapes

"sir, where did you get these grapes?"

"Korea"

they turned to look at each other again, apparently I was bringing in the equivalent of a WMD

about 5 minutes later the officer doing the inspection finally looked at the label "product of California, U.S.A."

laughter ensued, I was given my grapes and allowed on through

Seems like someone could take advantage of this by making fake product labels.

OK, that explains produce. Why the War on Kinder Surprise? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Surprise

My Italian friends think it's a bit odd that you can't buy one of those in the US, because they're dangerous for children, but you can let 9 year olds loose with fully automatic weapons, and of course buy all kinds of guns. I can't do much more than shrug: every place has its contradictions.

Additionally: I personally hate the damn things. My kids love to get them because of the stupid surprise. Sometimes my daughter just ignores the chocolate completely. It's a bit of marketing akin to the McDonalds Happy Meal with the cheap plastic toy. A far greater injustice in the world is not being able to import prosciuttos and similar cured meats.

There are things like this absolutely everywhere. My favourite is that where I come from you can't fill your own LPG gas tank in the car, it has to be done by a "qualified" person(because it's too dangerous to do it yourself!), which means you have to ask someone at the station to do it for you, but when filling any other fuel we have those little locks on the pistol which let you put it in and leave it until the tank is full.

In the UK on the other hand it is the exact opposite. You can fill your own LPG tank no problem, but I have not seen any pistols with the locks on them, because "it would be dangerous, what if you leave it in and forget about it??". It's just a matter of interpretation, a thing that is seen as dangerous in one country is completely fine in another.

Yep - the state I'm from in the US, Oregon, has a law that says you can't pump your own gasoline.

Wasn't that law implemented to create more jobs, rather than for safety?

Same for New Jersey. I was informed somewhere along the line that it was originally for safety and never got repealed. Now it seems to have morphed into a jobs "plan".

IIRC correctly its actually has to do with insurance premiums rather than blanket "safety" reasons.

See also:

  UK: It's illegal to sell washed eggs

  US: It's illegal to sell unwashed Eggs

Spoiler: In the UK, we keep eggs outside the fridge, and with the natural protection on the eggs (Removed when washed), they tend to keep for weeks. In the US, they tend to keep eggs in the fridge. Also a lot to do with how the chickens are kept. If you're not allowed to wash eggs (UK), it's more likely the chickens will be kept in sanitary, good conditions.

OTOH, It's cheaper for the producer to keep chickens in worse conditions, wash the eggs removing the protection and make consumers keep eggs in the fridge!

It has almost nothing to do with the breeding conditions. Factory farming techniques are pretty much identical across the globe. The reason is salmonella.

USDA mandates egg washing to combat salmonella. But the washing process also destroys the egg's outer most protective layer, the cuticle. Thus American eggs must be refrigerated, unlike almost everywhere else in the world.

In the UK, all chickens are already vaccinated against salmonella so their eggs don't need to be washed, nor refrigerated. This has a couple of benefits:

1. The cuticle remains intact, thus the egg is naturally protected against contamination during transport and storage.

2. Refrigerated eggs undergo temperature swings during transport, causing moistures to collect, which could lead to harmful bacterial growth.

3. A botched washing job leads to excess moisture and thus bacteria growth, and is worst than no washing job at all.

That's why it's actually illegal for the farm to wash the eggs in the UK.

That's true, and I'd forgotten the point about salmonella.

I'm sure a lot of it does have to do with conditions though. If you have to wash the eggs anyway, you can keep them in factory conditions, and wash off all the shit. If you're not allowed to wash the eggs, then you tend to be a bit more careful, and keep them in better conditions.

We have a lock, it just disables when the tank is full.

Well, I live in the UK and I have literally never seen a pistol with a functional locking clip. Ever. Maybe there are petrol stations here which have them working,but I am yet to see one.

>> but you can let 9 year olds loose with fully automatic weapons, and of course buy all kinds of guns.

You really don't know how the US or guns work, do you?

Perhaps "loose" could be debated, but something like this would likely not happen in most European countries:

http://www.snopes.com/info/news/uzi.asp

And this kind of thing is much rarer:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/20/us/fsu-incident/index.html...

I'm from the US and know quite well how things work.

I'll also add this link, as I think it's an excellent, and nuanced view that a lot of people elsewhere don't know about or see:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/04/gun...

It's not likely to happen in the US either, but sometimes unlikely things happen. That shooting instructor died because he was stupid. If he were smarter, he would have known not to give a kid a gun that even adults have difficulty shooting. And a single article of someone doing something stupid does not a picture of an entire culture paint. And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity, or shootings.

Statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...

> And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity

No, it doesn't. That's a universal thing.

That's a very odd table. Did you notice that if you sort by Homicide, nearly all the top 20 are in the Americas?

Its only 75 "countries and dependencies" in a world of something like 190 countries (not counting dependencies).

I suspect that the weighting toward the Americas isn't that the Americas are more violent, but that the Americas happened to host the countries in the intersection of higher gun homicide rates and sufficient stability to collect and report meaningful statistics.

Yep, those are all 9 year olds accidentally killing shooting instructors. The neighborhood gun range is the head of a river of blood flowing through our streets.

It's an extremely narrow, decontextualized view of the situation. It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence. I would say our issue is not guns, it's our "War on Drugs" and our relative proximity to all of those nearly-failed-states in Central- and South America that rank higher than us in those categories that are the center for production of those drugs, and the cartels that control them.

> It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence.

Well the former question is certainly a good one. Maybe you're right that it's the most important one.

However, tools matter too - a gun is a way more efficient way of killing a lot of people quickly than a knife is. Both are far more lethal than Kinder Surprise eggs.

Further to the _more efficient way_ point, they're also far quicker, so a very brief murderous impulse has more chance of being followed through with.

This specific example is surely meant to represent the wider range of accidents involving guns and children [1], and through that the yet more general issue of gun safety overall.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-h..., for instance

Crappy chocolate, crappy toy. Yet somehow, put them together and kids find them irresistible.

fwii you couldn't take them from Canada into the US until very recently, I read something or the other about now being allowed, don't quote me at the border.

Similar to the medfly 'Breeders' of this article, there's also informed speculation that covert actors are intentionally bringing Australian insects to California to destroy Eucalyptus trees. See:

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/22/157189794/invasive-pests-or-ti...

I wonder if that counts as biological warfare?

I mean, theoretically you could really hurt an entire industry. A large Fruit Fly outbreak in certain countries could have really affect gdp

>I wonder if that counts as biological warfare?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_against_the_potato_beetle

i remember how we, schoolchildren, collected these beetles which "American imperialists send to destroy our potato crops". That could have easily been photo of me only i was in USSR, not in Eastern Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_against_the_potato_beetle#G... :)

Good memories! I did take part in that "war", only that for me it happened after the Wall had already fallen (somewhere in the mid-'90s) but the damn beetles were still doing their thing. It was me, my brother and our grand-mother collecting those damn insects all-day long somewhere in a Carpathian village.

in that case, being from Eastern-European country, you may find this entertaining (i suppose your former country has done the right thing - i.e. join the NATO :) given the way (pro-)Russian rebels appeared

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle#2014_pro...

and

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_of_Saint_George)

I understand it does, yes. The infamous Porton Down apparently has (or at the very least had) a large collection of nasty agricultural pests and knows how to weaponise them (and presumably how to defend against them). This kind of thing has indeed been explored in the context of warfare.

http://cns.miis.edu/cbw/agchron.htm chronicles some cases (and several hoaxes).

The article doesn't mention it, but the perpetrator's likely motivation is also very interesting.

Eucalyptus trees cause forest fires.

How? Do they produce a much larger volume of leaf litter or catch fire easier?

A customs dog sniffed me out and his handler searched my bag in 2010. I had some chocolates infused with orange oil in my pack.

She was satisfied but apparently you can't bring oranges into Mexico from the USA or vice versa.

Since then I always pack breakfast for early morning flights across the border, but I'm careful to eat it before landing or leave it for the aeromozas to clean up.

A customs dog once sniffed out my gf's orange zest scented shampoo. Got cornered by some officers and had to empty my suitcase. Security isn't always this strict though so it's pretty inconsistent at best.

The last time I visited the States I forgot that I had a half eaten tuna sandwhch that I'd bought in the departure lounge in Bangkok. I was detained for an hour and threatened with fines and jail time! An sweet elderly woman from Hong Kong was sitting next to me because she had forgotten that she had the equivilant of three dollars in loose change in the bottom of her purse which she hadn't declared. She couldn't speak any english and customs didn't even try to find a translator, they kept shouting at her at high speed with his hand on the baton on his belt as if he was going to pull it out and strike her. She was in tears. I tried to translate the best I could in my broken Cantonese in between trying to figure out what they had against tuna sandwiches. It was almost surrealistic. Customs in Mainland China, who are not the most enduring bunch of people on their best day were still orders of magnitude more polite and civil than what I saw that day.

Last night I was in a bar in Phnom Penh and an American yelled at me because I didn't agree instantly that America was the greatest country on earth. I have nothing against America, I grew up there, and there are a lot of very decent kind people there. But I don't live there, and after a long string of incidents like the one with customs I can't honestly say that America is the greatest country on earth. There are places which are better and places that are much much worse. I've lived in both.

My guess is that the guy yelling at me had something against tuna sandwiches as well....

You're allowed to take up to $10,000 into the US without declaring it, I believe. I'm guessing they sent her to the room because they were afraid she was trying to illegally immigrate and just complaining about the money to try and rattle her. Some of the horror stories about US Customs are so ridiculous.

When I came back from China last year through Toronto, they sent me to the room because they thought I was bringing food (even though I didn't declare any nor did I have any). Luckily the guy in the room there was more reasonable and let me go quickly without a hassle. Going through customs as an American is terrifying enough...can't imagine being a non-American.

There's a lot of good and bad about America. Unfortunately customs is on the bad sad often times...which happens to be the first impression a lot of people get of the country.

About 5 years ago In my early 20s I tried to bring some tulip bulbs back from the Netherlands. I bought them after the main season, in November when they no longer had the official inspection stamps on the packages. I declared one package of them and tried to bullshit the CPB lady about how the stamp fell off and how they were for my mom for her birthday. After some time I acquiesced and when she asked if I had any other bulbs, I took them out for her. I take comfort in knowing I have a record, somewhere deep in the bowls of Fort Meade or Bluffdale, of attempted agricultural products smuggling.

Looking back on the tulips thing, I probably wouldn't try to do it again, not because I could get in trouble, but because I now know there is a slim chance I could introduce some random organism into a new ecosystem where it could wreak havoc. Yet at the same time, I can't tell if the whole no agricultural products rules for individuals crossing borders is bullshit or not. Almost all of the major invasive species in the US (snakefish, ashwood beetle, fire ants) were introduced via container ships.

"TSA officer and her barking dog"

The TSA is the agency that checks you for weapons before you enter the airport. Customs & Immigration would care about the oranges, so the woman probably worked for them.

"If you cross any state line, a human asks you if you’re carrying any fruits and vegetables."

I've only ever heard of this happening when entering California.

I've only ever heard of this happening when entering California.

I've driven through 36 states and only seen this in California as well, and even then it's only on some highways entering California.

> and even then it's only on some highways entering California

When I entered California several times from the northern border with Oregon, it was like every other state-crossing to me -- oh, a state line, simply keep driving.

When I heard about being stopped at the California border about a month ago on another social website, I was confused until informed that these border checks were more so along the edges with Nevada.

Interstate 80 has one because the big interstate tractor-trailers run along Interstate 80. The other, smaller highways around South Lake Tahoe and the like don't.

Which route did you take from Oregon to California? My wife and I drove from Seattle to California after our wedding and when we entered CA on I-5, we were stopped. I initially thought it was a toll booth, so the guy at our car had a good laugh when he saw me opening up my wallet.

The one time I drove into California, it was at like 6:00am or so and the station was closed, so I just drove through. And even then, it was pretty far in from the actual state line. Definitely not the most impenetrable border protection.

You'll see signs like "importation of firewood prohibited" or "clean off your fucking boat" but yeah, California's the only one that stops you.

Try taking a set of bagpipes into the US.

Are you talking about this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/05/bagpipes-new-ha... ?

Yes!

Or a Steinway piano. - http://www.today.com/id/30442451#.VG1nVYVb9hF

So if you plan to take your laptop it is better to upload the disk image and buy a new one in the states? I'm assuming the TSA can force a foreigner to unlock and then copy the disk.

Wow this is sick:

http://www.humblelibertarian.com/2011/06/10-of-tsas-worst-ac...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2014/07/07/th...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba030UmbkCo

http://www.humblelibertarian.com/2011/05/nottheonion-tsa-sea...

TSA has nothing to do with entry into the country—you don't encounter them on arrival unless you have an onward flight.

CBP handles immigration and customs.

A simple web search shows that that isn't true.

http://www.qantas.com.au/travel/airlines/travel-to-the-usa/g...

http://www.imore.com/tsa-will-require-devices-be-charged-int...

http://traveltips.usatoday.com/tsa-rules-international-trave...

I've entered the US through SeaTac, MSP, ATL, and SFO. In each of those, I never encountered TSA checkpoints until a connecting flight. If it is the final destination of your flight, you do not interact with TSA at all (unless you scream bomb in the airport or something).

Agreed. I've entered via SFO, SJC, ATL, JFK, LGA, MIA, HOU, and DFW and it's only CBP at the customs & immigration check... then onward to baggage rescan & TSA security checkpoint.

US customs officers can, upon attempted border entry, search and seize any baggage of any US or foreign citizen without a warrant or probable cause.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

The last paragraph is especially creepy. You can be treated as an animal, whenever they please.

What does your post have to do with bagpipes?

Are Kinder eggs still banned in the US? I remember my former manager got in lots of trouble trying to cross the border with some of them.

Kinda. Kinder now has a line of chocolates that they sell in the US, but the "surprise eggs" are still banned.

The problem is the eggs contain a small toy inside the chocolate, and small children either don't see it or don't know not to eat it. The EU is considering banning them too because they have had children die.

I really, really do not understand this at all. If a child dies because of what is inside that Kinder Egg, the adult that was supposed to look after the child would be responsible. Take them in for neglect or whatever, but don't ban some legitimite fun for children with responsible parents. Any child that is young enough to put everything in his/hers mouth, should be superwised by an adult and be in an environment where there is no such things anyway.

I have yet to hear about a ban or about children dying from choking on surprise egg toys. It's totally possible and sadly happens that small kids choke on small items but in general Europeans regard it as the parents responsibility to keep their kids away from choking hazards.

"The EU" is not considering any such thing, where did you get that idea?

I heard they were going to make children wear goggles when playing conkers too!

There was a campaign by a couple of parents, that culminated with the rejection of a ban back in 2000.

Only 3 children have died by choking on it in all its history. To put this in perspective cows kill 20 people per year in the US.

Someone's probably managed to choke to death on every popular type of treat.

http://www.health-benefits-of-dark-chocolate.com/death-by-ch...

"In 1910 a young woman dies while trying to share her chocolate with her co-workers. She attempted to cut the bar in pieces and instead slipped and cut an artery in her leg."

I am reminded of The Onion's take on such bans:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fun-toy-banned-because-of-t...

Nah. I really don't believe that this idea of a ban in the EU is supported by facts.

For me these things are rather uninteresting, but dangerous? The inside is quite huge and yellow (a capsule of sorts, containing the real toy). Inside of that you might have small stuff/a real choking hazard, depending on what you get (some things need to be assembled from parts).

My son is two. He wouldn't stuff that in his mouth. My daughter is 9 month old and stuffs everything in her mouth, so this is about as dangerous as ~everything~ in my household, including the toys of the 2 year old.

Plus .. I personally think that kids that still cannot distinguish between edible or inedible things shouldn't have chocolatey treats in the first place, but that's a different problem.

I mean, I guess the aluminum foil wrapping seems more dangerous to me then the toy inside, if we're talking about choke hazards.

No, the EU is not.

The EU rejected banning them in 2000 despite more than a decade of campaigning by parents of three children who died in the 80's from choking on parts of the toys [1]

No further action appears to have been taken by the EU since, and I've not found any mentions of further deaths since either.

Note that none of these three kids "did not see it". The toys in Kinder eggs are contained within large yellow containers, and none of the kids choked on the container, they choked on parts of the toy that they had taken out of the container.

The kids in question were 3 and 4 years old. 3 and 4 year olds regularly play with small toys, and most know better by then. If the child doesn't know better by 3-4 than to put tiny plastic toys in their mouth, then it's frankly the parents responsibility to supervise them better - they'll come into constant contact with small objects they can choke on in all kinds of places.

[1] http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Parents+hit+out+at+EU+over+tin...

We went to Mexico for a day trip and brought an apple in our cooler. Our friends fed us so we never opened the cooler. We forgot at customs and said we had nothing to declare. Customs decided to search our cooler and found the apple. We explained that we had brought it with us but forgotten about it. When he said it was contaminated from being in Mexico, I thought he was telling a joke, but he was dead serious. Thankfully he just confiscated it and let us on our way.

Bill Bailey on Australian Customs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s5AF4ahrOk

Australia has extremely strict customs because the flora and fauna is unique and has been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years.

We also don't have things like Rabies, and we'd like to keep it that way.

FYI: Australia has "Australian bat lyssavirus" which is indeed a thing very much like rabies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus. It surprised me when I learned about its existence :)

The UK doesn't have rabies either.

Not that it matters. A bite from an Australian animal would kill you before the rabies kick in anyway.

I had Fortnum and Masons Pork Pie taken from me by US Customs at Seattle Airpot :-(

I think thats the saddest things I have read today!

It was a present for a Brit friend working at Amazon.

Try to smuggle a pack of coffee through EU customs. If you think the agricultural ministry can be bad, try messing with the tax people.

Eh, I just returned from Jamaica with a bag of coffee and declared it on my customs form. The agent just waived me through.

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