Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Tea is generally from tea leaves/plants. I always declare tea, in the interest of helping the agricultural industry in my destination country.
I don't disagree - and I would have declared it myself - but to my colleague, the question using the word "food" did not cover "tea bags".
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, the issue is surely not just "made from a plant" but how much processing the plant material has received (ie, whether the processing has been sufficient to eliminate the risk of carrying disease or insects). If it's an entire freshly-plucked green plant with dirt still clinging to the roots, that's clearly a problem. But does anyone declare clothing made of cotton or linen (or hemp
)? Or a book or stationery kit because the paper came from a tree? Wooden buttons? Pencils?
I mentioned above the quarantine people who said I was "wasting their time" with chocolates. Imagine someone declaring every linen, cotton and paper item in their bag!
Tea leaves have been processed more than a freshly harvested plant, but not as much as the cotton in my shirt. They've probably been processed LESS than the wood in a box of pencils. This sort of question requires the passenger to make a judgement call as to whether the item has been processed
enough to be no longer considered "made from a plant" or not. And it's to be expected that different people would make different conclusions. In fact, my colleague might well have thought differently about loose tea leaves that had been measured out for him into a paper bag in a village in a developing country versus a shrink-wrapped box of name brand tea bags from a gift shop in Yorkshire.