curses! i go to the post office with pineapple tarts all wrapped up to send to everybody - christine and denis, jenny and bob, professors nohrnberg and nolan and all of them, and i couldn't send them! the guy at the post office very politely refused to accept the items and gave me a long notice to read and the short of it is that because of a new fda ruling that came into effect on dec 12th, all foodstuff mailed to the states from abroad, even food gifts from one individual to another, requires filing prior notice with the fda in case of bioterrorism! i've never heard anything so absurd but there you go! so i trudge home with my boxes again and look this up on the fda website and sure enough, you need to fill out tedious forms online that include information about manufacturer and registration numbers and what not, and then wait for an acknowledgement receipt (i hope it's instantaneous and electronically generated. if it requires a human being's approval on the other end it could take ages) which has to accompany your package. i tried to find a loophole somewhere and the best i could find was the bit that says that food prepared in your own residence and sent as a gift to an individual doesn't need to be registered. so that's one way, but then i figure that you couldn't get around declaring on the customs form that it's food, can you? and a food package that didn't have a clearance notice attached would stick right out, so they're bound to open my package if only for a cursory check, and then it would be clearer than daylight that these aren't home prepared items and then my metaphorical goose would be cooked. (i used to say rubbish customs officers have better things to do than open up student packages until they confiscated items from poach's package!) in the end i decided it was more trouble than it's worth to send them to the states at all, so i decided to send them all to julian in bermuda instead. so much for spreading the joy of singaporean eating around the world.

p.s. you know what irks me most? food accompanying you is exempt. so, supposing i were back in school, i won't be able to post any pineapple tarts to myself without filing notice, but if i took it in my suitcase with me that would be alright! what sense does that make? i should think it's much easier to tamper with stuff i made at home, if i wanted to poison a wealthy granduncle for his legacy. sigh.