Where chaos is the custom

One of the few compensations that offset the disappointment of having to end a great vacation abroad is the opportunity to bring back some of your favorite foreign goodies to eat at home as you try to recapture the taste and smell and feel of those glorious vacation days.

But what can you bring back -- legally?

When my family and I came back from France last month, I decided to find out. We filled two string bags with cheese, two kinds of pate, saucisson (dried sausage), jambon de Bayonne (a cured country ham), fresh fruit, shrink-wrapped slices of duck breast, two kinds of duck foie gras -- one in a jar and one in a can -- and a whole roast chicken, which we planned to eat on the plane (along with the fruit and a few other items).

Unlike a chef friend of mine who used to smuggle in ortolans (tiny, delectable French birds) packed amid his wife’s underwear, we were completely open and aboveboard. In Boston, where we cleared customs, we declared everything in writing on the customs form and again verbally to a customs inspector, following the advice of a veteran inspector who told me many years ago that to avoid trouble, “If you can eat it or plant it, declare it.”

We figured that if anything were confiscated, we wouldn’t protest. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Much to my surprise and delight, the inspector said the only items we couldn’t bring in were those she broadly characterized as “meat” -- responding, I later realized, to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection regulation that says, “You may not bring back fresh, dried, or canned meats or meat products from most foreign countries. Also, you may not bring in food products that have been prepared with meat.”

Thus, she confiscated and threw away our saucisson and our duck breast. (I always wondered if these inspectors took home all their confiscated bounty and had a big party with friends and family, but I saw her dump the stuff in the trash can.)

How about our half-eaten chicken and various cheeses and fruit?

“No problem,” she said.

“What about the foie gras?” I asked.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Duck liver,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s OK. That’s not meat.”

“How about our pate?” I asked, pushing my luck.

“What’s it made of?”

“Well, this one is a country pate -- mostly pork and some beef,” I said, handing her a butcher-wrapped package. “This one is chicken liver.”

She took (and tossed) the country pate but waved the chicken liver pate through.

So duck slices are meat but duck liver isn’t, and duck is meat but chicken isn’t?

A friend who also visited France this summer cleared customs a week later than we did, in Los Angeles, and customs inspectors here confiscated her saucissons too. She was also allowed to bring in her foie gras and her cheeses, which included raw-milk (unpasteurized) cheeses -- definite no-nos, I’d been told by customs inspectors on previous trips. And, unlike me, she made it through with her duck breast.

Was that because her duck breast was smoked and ours was not? No. The customs agent who cleared us didn’t care if our duck breast was smoked, sliced, raw or pickled. It was a meat product, by her definition of the term, so it wasn’t coming in. Period. My friend’s customs agent made no such judgment.

Intrigued -- baffled -- by these confusing and conflicting experiences, I decided to make a few phone calls.

Ha.

After calling various offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Customs and Border Protection agency, consulting their websites and asking if there were any definitive rules on what can and can’t be brought in, I decided the situation couldn’t be more confusing if the customs regulations had been written by Kafka.

“The rules change very frequently, depending on the disease status of the country you’re coming from,” says Sue Challis, spokeswoman for the Customs and Border Protection arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

That’s putting it mildly.

Inspectors’ whim

Ultimately, it seems to me, it’s mostly a matter of luck and timing -- of the knowledge, judgment and even, it appears, the mood of individual inspectors.

All prohibitions on bringing food into this country are based on the U.S. government’s admirable determination to shield Americans from any health hazards that could be transmitted from abroad. (Mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease and exotic Newcastle disease are three conditions that the USDA says have recently led inspectors to prohibit certain items coming in from the affected countries.)

The USDA publishes -- and posts online -- an Animal Products Manual and a set of agricultural products guidelines listing foodstuffs that are prohibited, permitted or restricted at any given time.

(The websites are www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/manuals/pdf files/APM_Chapters.htm) and www.aphis.usda.gov/travel/usdatips.html.) The USDA also posts periodic alerts when conditions and regulations change.

Dr. Maurine Bell, director of veterinary regulatory support at the USDA, says travelers can check these postings to see what they can bring in. She says inspectors at customs desks in airports and other points of entry are supposed to check them regularly so they know what products to keep out.

But my sense is that overworked customs inspectors are too busy to do much checking on these ever-changing regulations. Except for the most obvious items -- a steak from a country now widely known to be afflicted with mad cow disease -- I suspect that the process is largely capricious and arbitrary, all the manuals, postings and regulations notwithstanding.

Besides, the animal products website specifically says, in bright red letters, “the U.S. Government neither warrants nor assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information or procedure disclosed” on the site.

The government websites are as contradictory and impenetrable as they are incomplete. By the time you sort through all the asterisks, footnotes, bureaucratic gobbledygook and “special categories,” you’ll be so dizzy that you’ll be sure you’ve already been struck by both mad cow disease and swine flu.

I couldn’t even get a clear answer to my question on which cheeses -- or which kinds of cheeses -- are permitted. The website for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service says, “You may bring ... certain cheeses into the United States.” It doesn’t say which ones, and no official I asked could say either. One told me hard cheeses are fine but not soft cheeses. Another said pasteurized cheeses were OK but not raw-milk cheeses. Yet another said it depended on which country the cheeses came from -- and whether they were cow’s-milk cheeses, sheep’s-milk cheeses or goat’s-milk cheeses. But he couldn’t be specific.

I encountered similar uncertainty when I asked about fruits and vegetables. I distinctly remember being told on past trips that I couldn’t bring any produce into California, so I put in a call to Larry Hawkins, the Sacramento-based regional spokesman for APHIS. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I can’t tell you anything that makes it really clear. It’s the point of origin that determines whether or not the item can be brought in. You can bring in avocados from some countries, for example, but not from Mexico because they have fruit flies and seed weevils that can infest avocados.”

How about fruit from France? I brought in apples, melon and nectarines.

The melon and nectarines were OK, he said, but the inspector should have confiscated my apples.

“Apples from France are prohibited,” he said. “So is garlic, kiwi, pears, tomatoes and yams. And you can’t bring artichokes, eggplant or grapes into California or the Southwest, but you can bring them into the North Atlantic.”

What’s a traveler to do?

How could an average tourist be expected to know or keep track of these distinctions?

“The best advice I can offer travelers is to check with the USDA before you leave,” Hawkins said. “Tell them where you’re going and what you want to bring back in and see if it’s OK.”

But what about impulse purchases -- you see or taste something and decide spontaneously to buy it? I’d bet that most folks don’t know beforehand what they’re likely to find or want abroad, especially if they’re visiting a country or a region for the first time.

“Yes,” Hawkins said, “that does confound the issue.”

And don’t disease conditions change so often that what’s legal to bring in when you leave might be illegal by the time you return?

“Yes. That confounds the issue too.”

I called Washington and got a similar answer on other products.

“You’re just not going to find an easy-to-use list of items that can come in in terms of meat and poultry,” Jim Rogers, the APHIS spokesman there, told me. “Your best bet is to call from abroad.”

I laughed.

“You mean if I’m in a small town in Burgundy, as I was last month, and I see a jar of foie gras I want to buy, I’m supposed to whip out my global cellphone and try to find someone in the customs bureaucracy in Washington who can tell me if it’s legal to bring it in?”

Now he laughed.

“Well,” he said, “you could ask the merchant if they can ship it to you in the U.S. If they say no, that might be a good indicator that you can’t bring it in.”

Oh, sure. The clerk at a village charcuterie in the French provinces is going to know all the U.S. import/export rules.

Rogers agreed that was unlikely. Besides, even if I got accurate answers from the French clerk and the Washington bureaucrat, that doesn’t mean the particular customs agent I encounter when I return to the U.S. will know the rules, right?

“Right,” Rogers acknowledged. “One of the problems is that we at APHIS are responsible for writing the rules, but the Department of Homeland Security are the ones with the inspectors at the borders that enforce them.

“Another problem is that most of these rules were designed for commercial importers and exporters, so it’s very tough for the individual tourist to know what he can and can’t bring in.”

What about my and my friend’s duck breasts?

“The general rule of thumb, coming from Europe, is that you can’t bring beef in but you can bring other meat if it’s been cooked in the can. Shrink-wrapped won’t do it.”

So the customs inspector who confiscated my duck breast was right, and the one who didn’t confiscate my friend’s was wrong? And “our” customs inspector shouldn’t have let us bring in our uneaten chicken or our foie gras in a jar?

“Right,” Rogers said.

OK. But I’m going to insist that my friend share her duck breast with me -- or else I’ll report her to Rogers.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.