An Unwanted Snack Break at the Airport

When I was standing in the security line recently at Newark Liberty International Airport en route to Paris, I heard two Transportation Security Administration officers ask passengers to remove any food from their carry-ons and place it in a bin. “It’s a new policy,” one officer said. “Anything edible must now be screened separately.”

Rifling through my two carry-ons to find everything took me more than five minutes, and after the initial screening, my bin was pulled aside so that a TSA officer could examine its contents by hand. The officer then put the bin through for a secondary screening.

All told, I was held up an additional 15 minutes. But was the delay necessary?

“There is no official policy which says that TSA agents must ask passengers to remove food from their bags,” said Mike England, a TSA spokesman. “Rather, the policy is that officers have the right to ask passengers to remove food if they feel that it’s necessary.”

England said the TSA put this policy into effect last summer as part of a broader move to declutter overstuffed carry-ons because the contents of a too-full bag can be difficult to see when being screened. “In addition, some food materials look similar to explosives in an X-ray,” he said.

Giving TSA officers the ability to ask passengers to separate their food may be a year-old rule, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it seems to be happening more frequently in recent months.

George Hobica, an airline industry analyst, flies several times a month and said that he had never been asked to put food in its own bin until about a month ago. “Since then, I’ve been asked by TSA officers in numerous instances to take my food out,” he said.

Hobica said that he does not take anything to eat with him in his carry-on, but has been held up behind passengers who do. In one case two weeks ago, when he was flying from Los Angeles International Airport to Kennedy Airport, the woman in front of him had two bags filled with a vast amount food.

“She was already late for her flight, and finding everything took her several minutes,” Hobica said. “Her bin got flagged for a secondary screening, which took so long that she ended up missing her flight.”

Stellene Volandes, the editor-in-chief of Town and Country magazine, had forgotten about the bag of dried peaches at the bottom of her carry-on, and her bin was flagged for a secondary screening. Searching through her bag to find the fruit and having her carry-on screened again added about five minutes to her security experience, she said.

It was a different case for the man in front of her. “It seemed like he had gone on a full Costco run for Starburst and bite-size Twix, and it took him almost 15 minutes to unpack it all and get through security,” she said. “Luckily, I am an early-to-the-airport type.”

From a security perspective, screening anything edible separately is a smart idea, said Larry Studdiford, a security consultant for airports and the founder of Studdiford Technical Solutions, a security firm in Alexandria, Virginia. “It’s true that some food can resemble explosives,” he said. A PowerBar looks like an explosive in an X-ray machine, Studdiford said, while a block of cheese can look similar to an explosive called C-4.

The fact that TSA officers randomly ask passengers to separate their food is also a wise security move, Studdiford said. “It goes along with the lines of being unpredictable,” he said. “The last thing TSA wants to do is be predictable because if you have a predictable process, it is potentially easier to game the system and sneak in dangerous substances,” he said.

But from Hobica’s point of view, passengers would be more prepared if they knew that food needed to be screened on its own. “Hopefully, fliers would go into security with their food already separated like they do their toiletries,” he said. “Right now, they’re caught off guard, and it’s holding up lines.”

Some fliers have been tipped off by their family and friends about TSA’s food request and are prepared for the security process. Carter Wilcox recently flew out of JFK to Savannah, Georgia, with her young twin sons. Her mother-in-law had recently been delayed almost 20 minutes at airport security because she could not find the packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in her carry-on. Knowing this, Wilcox had put her family’s lunches and snacks in a separate bag.

“I was ready, and asked the TSA agent if I should put my food in its own bin,” she said. “She told me ‘no’ and asked me why in the world would I have to do that?”