Brickbat: Quite an Expensive Sandwich

Australian authorities fined 77-year-old New Zealand resident June Armstrong $3,300 (U.S. $2,034) for bringing a chicken sandwich into the country. Armstrong bought the sandwich, which was sealed, at the Christchurch airport and put it into her backpack intending to eat it on her flight. But she forgot about it until a customs official in Australia went through her backpack. The Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry website says travelers can be fined if they fail to declare goods that pose a "high level of biosecurity risk."

Comments

[Chumby]

Quite a lot of bread for that sandwich.

[SQRLSY One]

This whole-wheat-bread-affair, on the whole, does sound kinda chicken-shit. Since chicken-shit WAS involved here, and chicken-shit DOES pose a "high level of biosecurity risk", then I can SNOT see twat the problem is here! Government Almighty DOES need to defend us AND defund us, in the open-faced, shitty-sandwich of biosecurity risks! THIS is why Government Almighty is, and MUST be, shit-faced! ALWAYS trust in Government Almighty!

[TwilaMiller]

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[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Sure not chicken feed!

[Chumby]

No. It was not a poultry amount.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

More valuable than hens' teeth.

[Don't look at me!]

Where is she going to find that kind of scratch?

[Chumby]

At that cost, folks will flock away.

[Don't look at me!]

Chickens!

[Dillinger]

Fowl!

[Adans smith]

Must have been from Burger King.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Fine Christchurch airport for selling biosecurity risks.

[SQRLSY One]

Cheeses on sammitches are ALSO biosecurity hazards!!!

So, let me tell you about Cheeses! Let Cheeses into your life, you living, walking, talking biosecurity hazard, you!!!

[Michael P]

New Zealand infectious agents aren’t biosecurity risks in New Zealand. They’re risks when they get carried to Australia. The same is true in the other direction. Both countries take this super, super serial, and absolutely will fine people for undeclared items.

On the other hand, they can also be reasonable. I accidentally brought a half eaten bag of trail mix from the US into New Zealand. I declared it, and they didn’t even make me destroy it. They focused more on me having hiked in a US national park a few weeks earlier — they wanted to know whether I was bringing those boots into their country.

[Agammamon]

Yet they still allow people to travel between the countries. If they took the risks seriously they wouldn't do that. There's no telling what crazy diseases you could have, living a thousand miles away. And they're humans - so every disease they have is incredibly communicable to humans.

[B G]

What if she'd eaten the sandwich on the plane but then vomited after clearing the entry inspection?

Would the bio-hazard posed by the sandwich (is the microbiome environment so different in NZ compared to AUS?) be any less at that point? Wouldn't the same be true for any kind of poultry served in-flight by the airline since it'd be sourced in the origin country?

Sandwiches traveling in backpacks aside, aren't there wild birds who are capable of flying between Australia and New Zealand on their own steam (migratory species in North America can definitely cover far longer distances in a single flight)? Does anyone check those birds in/out of whichever country, or monitor what they're interacting with along the way?

[Jerry B.]

And, of course, they couldn't just say "Sorry, ma'am, you'll have to throw that in the trash (or biohazard container)", and let it go at that.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I'd bet real dollars (not the Aussie kind) that they just tossed it in a garbage can and it got carted off to the local dump.

[Don't look at me!]

Or someone had it for lunch.

[Kyol]

If she'd declared it, they probably would have done just that.

They probably hear "Oh, I TOTALLY forgot about that!" a few dozen times a day when they find undeclared items in somebody's luggage.

Or, they might be assholes on a revenue-generating power-trip...

[B G]

What's the possible upside for anyone to smuggle chicken sandwiches internationally if they're doing it one at a time for the price of a commercial airline ticket?

Even if they've bought the ticket with "miles", the time cost of making the trip would far exceed the value of having a "contraband" chicken sandwich in place where it's unlikely that such an item is hard to obtain via legitimate channels.

If they're using the sandwich to conceal some kind of high-value object (proprietary microchip, hope diamond, name your favorite movie cliche), there's got to be other alternatives to a sandwich that wouldn't draw scrutiny on the way into the destination country.

In short (for those who want the TL:DR version), what possible motivation would a traveler have to pretend that they "forgot" about a sandwich (or some other similarly mundane object which technically requires declaration) in their backpack after a flight? If the inspectors hear "I forgot about that" multiple times each day, it's most likely because they're dealing with hundreds of individuals every day, and some fraction of those are going to be less than focused on whether or not they still have an "impulse" purchased consumable item that they bought several hours earlier.

[Longtobefree]

As a conformed beef eater, I applaud declaring chickens a biohazard.
Lock them up in tiny cages and only let them produce eggs.
(ideally, in California)

[Brandybuck]

But free range eggs taste soooo much better, simply due to that added smugness.

[markm23]

If "free range" means letting the hens run to find bugs and eat them, the eggs do taste much better. But if it only means the hens can wander a couple of feet while eating the same packaged chicken feed, the eggs will taste the same as from any caged hen fed the same.

[John F. Carr]

Australian customs authorities take pride in being petty.

[IceTrey]

Sounds like Australia is still an open air prison.

[Gasman]

Had she eaten the biosecurity risk sandwich, then shit it out in Australia, would the charges still be presented?

[Livemike]

This isn't as unfair as it sounds. Bringing in foodstuffs from outside Australia could result in billions of dollars worth of diseases damage. There are more than enough reminders of this in Australian airports and plenty of places to legally throw away the food before you exit the gates.

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