Turkey Day and the TSA

It's that time of year again, when we engage in a time-honored Foreign Service rite:  scrounging up ingredients for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.   This practice can take several forms, depending on how exotic your current location happens to be.  I rather hope that nothing will top our first post of Mongolia.  In the year before we got there, the community was actually raising live turkeys in the garage of the Deputy Chief of Mission.  Sometimes, I really miss that place.

Overall, we were not in bad shape in Mongolia, because things were so hard to get there that the State Department allowed us to ship a certain amount of food to post, so I carefully planned for enough cranberry sauce, spices, and pumpkin pie filling to last 2 Thanksgivings and 2 Christmases.   I did have to put a bounty out for any form of celery that might have been lurking in Ulaanbaatar, and the community came through with a lead in the end, to my stuffing's relief.   Which brings me to this year....

On the whole, American products are much easier to find here in Trinidad.  Turkey?  It took 3 stores, but we finally snared one.   Cranberry sauce?  If you're wiling to pay $2.50 a can, it's yours!  Canned pumpkin?  That one was proving a bit more challenging.  But one of our friends was heading to the states last week, and he said he'd pick up a few cans for us.

The issues arose when he went to check in for his flight, and was only traveling with a carry-on.  The TSA flagged his bag for liquids and opened it to find our 2 rebellious cans of pumpkin.  Agent #1 was not sure if these cans of pumpkin constituted a threat to our national security and to the plane full of passengers, so he got a supervisor.  Supervisor was also not sure if pumpkin was allowed.  Our friend was asked, is this liquid-y pumpkin filling, or high quality solid pumpkin?  He assured them it was the highest possible quality.  They ran it through the viscosity machine (! seriously, this exists), and determined it could pass.  Victory!  It's the little triumphs that make this life so entertaining....