Be Sure to Score Some Smuggled Kinder Eggs for Easter
Caution! Toy-filled confection ahead.
Customs and Border Protection actually boasts about how many Kinder Eggs it confiscates at the national boundary. "These chocolate treats may be cute and seasonal but they are too dangerous to children to be imported legally into the U.S.," insist the meddlesome feds. Bullshit. The rest of the world eats them without a problem, they taste better than the pale (and safe!) American imitations, and it's our own damned decision to make as to whether to introduce these tasty grenades of chocolate doom into our plastic grass-filled baskets—or to consume them at any other time.
So feel free to smuggle'em, buy contraband shipments, and enjoy the damned chocolaty goodness. Because to hell with the busybodies.
In 2012, CBP crowed:
Last fiscal year 2011, CBP seized more than 60,000 Kinder Eggs from travelers' baggage and from international mail shipments. This was more than twice the number seized in fiscal year 2010. The product violates both Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. As the U.S. government's law-enforcement agency at the border, CBP is charged with enforcing the regulations of both agencies to keep safety hazards away from American consumers.
It's not just confiscation—the feds have been known to threaten people with fines of $2,500 per egg. This is fucking chocolate with a toy inside. Chocolate of doom, of course.
Oh, these things are considered too dangerous for us because the chocolate entirely surrounds a toy contained within a capsule large enough to make a credible horse suppository. Apparently, you might choke on that. Seriously. If you can swallow one, I want to see the show.
That's not to say that Kinder Eggs don't make it into the United States. People bring them into the country all the time (as the CBP figures suggest). They come in innocently, because they're candy. People evade the law deliberately, because they're delicious and fun candy (and there's a buck to be made from supplying stuff people want). And Canadians make fun of us over the ban, because they should.
It's a stupid ban, and people shouldn't obey stupid and intrusive restrictions. Especially when they stand between us and pleasure.
And if the feds are going to be so gleeful about their enforcement efforts, let's try to change their minds in a creative way. Keep the Kinder Eggs handy, and maybe slip a spare one into a bureaucrat's bag right before he passes through Customs. That's just good fun.
And, if it's handy, toss a bag of dope in too. Why not?
