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WEST JORDAN — How would you like to pay $300 for a mango?
That's what a Utah woman, Edna Smith, had to pay when she brought a mango home from Indonesia. And then she didn't even get to keep it.
Every year, customs officials seize hundreds of thousands of illegal souvenirs. Sometimes it's Cuban cigars, sometimes it's hazardous materials. But a lot of what they seize is fruits, vegetables and meat.
Smith said she loves preparing meals from her native Indonesia, but finding the right foods in West Jordan isn't always easy. A mango from Indonesia got her into trouble with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“In American we only see two kinds: one, the yellow Filipino mango, and the other from Mexico. That’s all,” she said.
She said there are probably 10 types of mangoes grown in Indonesia. “And they are all different tastes,” she added.
Smith and a friend brought fresh mango pieces along with some dried meat back from their recent trip to Indonesia. But she ran into trouble going through customs.
“When they opened the luggage, they found the mango fruits and the dried meats. They threw away that one, then they fined us $300,” she said.
She was fined not so much because of the fruit itself, but because she didn't tell customs agents that she had it.
And the USDA website has a long list of foods travelers can and cannot bring home.
Smith said she didn't realize the U.S. has strict rules about overseas souvenirs. There's a good reason for the rules, according to Frank Falcon of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“People don’t realize that a lot of fruits, meats, carry diseases. They carry insects, they carry eggs, things we may not be aware of,” he said.
In the early ‘80s, California grappled with a massive outbreak of Mediterranean fruit flies. It took tens of millions of dollars and the National Guard to keep the tiny, non-native critters from devouring the state's agricultural industry, all because someone carried one tiny piece of citrus fruit onto an airplane.
Smith said she's done bringing fruits home from Indonesia, no matter how sweet or good they are.
Some fines can run into thousands of dollars, plus some jail time is possible.
