Originally Posted by
chollie
The problem isn't the scientific v. colloquial use of the term 'organic' (or 'sharp' or 'food'). The problem is that instead of training 45K employees to use 'organic' the same way, TSA prefers to hound and harass millions of flyers for not understanding the many different ways TSOs use the word 'organic'.
The problem for pax is that you never know when you're going to encounter an aggressive TSO who, with the full support of his/her co-workers, LTSOs, STSOs and supervisors, uses a particular interpretation of the word to harass and bully pax.
The best tactic I have found is to grovel, ask what exactly the TSO in front of you means by 'organic' or 'sharp' or 'food', and then over-declare anything and everything I can possibly think of. If worse comes to worse, I'll say I didn't have my bag in my sight at all times and it's possible someone in the family could have slipped something in unawares. That will likely get me a punitive extended bag search, but AFAIK, it's not illegal yet to have someone in the family slip something into your bag without your knowledge. I can't be accused of failing to disclose something I didn't know was in my bag.
Even if DHS employees were to use a phrase in the same way all the time for a given purpose, passengers may not all understand the phrase/term in the same way all the time.
I'd be surprised if the shoes of most returning government and military officials coming back from assignments/work trips abroad had no foreign "organic matter" on them. Yet CBP gives most such people and the rest a pass at customs even as there may be potential harm for our environment from what is on the bottom of most of those shoes. It's because even CBP doesn't entirely understand that they really aren't designed to catch everything