Carmen Ghia

Resident Frequent Flyer

A woman who just flew back home from Las Vegas says an airport security officer confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be a security risk.
 
Rebecca Hains said the Transportation Security Administration agent at McCarran International Airport took her cupcake, telling her its frosting was enough like a gel to violate TSA restrictions on allowing liquids and gels onto flights to prevent them from being used as explosives. She said the agent told her the frosting was conforming to the jar it was inside.

“I just thought this was terrible logic,” Hains said.

Hains, who lives in Peabody, just north of Boston, said the agent didn’t seem concerned that the cupcake could actually be explosive, just that it fit some bureaucratic definition about what was prohibited. She said he even offered to let her eat it away from the airport security area.

Hains, a 35-year-old communications professor at Salem State University, said she told the agent she had passed through security at Boston’s Logan International Airport earlier in the week with two cupcakes packaged in jars, gifts from a student. But she said the agent told her that just meant TSA in Boston didn’t do its job.

The TSA, which is entrusted with protecting the nation’s transportation system, was reviewing the situation, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said. Passengers are allowed to take cakes and cupcakes through checkpoints, he said.
Hains ultimately surrendered the cupcake. But she said the situation highlighted a lack of common sense by the agent and the ludicrousness of TSA policies.

“It’s not really about the cupcake; I can get another cupcake,” she said. “It’s about an encroachment on civil liberties. We’re just building up a resistance and tolerance to all these things they’re doing in the name of security, when it’s really theater. It is not keeping us safe.”

Air travel is definitely not what it used to be. With that said, it’s really not much of a surprise that frosting on cupcakes would get confiscated for resembling plastic explosives.

Ever since that terrorist with the explosive sneakers was thwarted from igniting them, we have been itemizing what we’re allowed to carry onto planes, from toothpaste to cologne.

The TSA has deemed that a certain amount of liquid explosives could be enough to bring down a 747 jet. So, now I’m forced to limit the ounces of make-up and moisturizer I would like to travel with.
Fortunately, most hotels are providing complimentary shampoo and conditioner, and in some cases, even lotion. But, there’s still nothing like your own. I generally can find my favorite brands in convenient “travel sizes,” and that helps out tremendously.

However, if I ever wanted to bring back some of my mom’s homemade salsa or jarred peppers, I may just be plain out of luck. These are things she now has to send to me via UPS Ground.

The time has finally come where our freedoms are being seriously restricted because somehow terrorists may have figured out a way to make explosives out of cupcakes.

Isn’t it comforting to know that when it comes to safe air travel that no stone has been left unturned? Suddenly, the MegaBus and railway travel are starting to look better and better all the time.