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Friday, March 5, 2010

The tragedy of flying foods

Traveling with wonderful food finds has been seriously curtailed with advent of the ban on carryon liquids, gels, pastes and their ilk. This article at the Washington Post detail a heartbreaking series of anecdotes of jams, jellies, and other preserved foods lost and discarded simply because of this odd security policy. Often, the situation is nonsensical - the detailed story about how soft cheeses have to be discarded while the hard cheeses remained is one that flies completely at the face of common sense. Moreover, if such liquids are suspected of being possible explosive ingredients, confiscated substances seem to be discarded with little regard for their potential explosive nature.

I'd like recruit volunteers to conduct an experiment, bringing along half a dozen eggs through airport security - two of them raw, two of them soft boiled, and two of them hard boiled - thus, bridging the range from liquid, to gel to solid. And see how they fare. It's a fairly cheap thing to do, and you end up with a snack to eat while waiting for your flight.

Of course, the flaw here is that the volume of the egg may be below the detectible limit. Perhaps if I had goose eggs?

1 comment:

  1. I think the problem with that experiment is that carrying eggs usually involves the distinctive "carton"! Most likely all would be discarded.

    It is sad, though. My husband and I are headed to Italy in a few weeks and I know I will want to bring home wine and olive oil at the least...

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