Bought a panettone at an Italian bakery while I was traveling - had it in my carry-on last night at PDX. The carry-on ran through the scanner, got flagged. I thought it was likely to be for the Kindle and the iPad (neither of which are supposed to have to be removed, but I think when they are packed together it makes a large, laptop-sized blacked out shape), but a very grim agent informed me it was for a liquid or a gel.

I didn't THINK I left a liquid or gel in there, I was pretty sure they were all in my little quart bag, but I watched as they took every thing out (no liquids) and then eyed the panettone, wrapped in several colors of cellophane.

They ran the panettone through and asked me, in a hostile and suspicious tone, what was inside.

"Eggs, butter, sugar, flour, probably some rum, maybe some nuts and definitely some dried fruits."

After another run through the scanner and some consultation, they let it go. When I cut it open this morning I expected to find it very underdone in the center, but it was perfect (and delicious).

What this implies to me is that there is something very wrong with the scanner setting, if it's kicking out baked goods with chunks of dried fruit....

Perhaps on the first pass they saw it was undercooked so sent it through again to cook it properly

It almost certainly showed the density of something suspicious.

And if you have something similar that you wanted to get aboard, you could just put it inside a panettone. Certainly sealing it first, and then having it handled by fresh hands at each stage of the sealing, insertion and final sealing process.

Here is where the lack of forethought and rational thinking comes into play.

Objects like this trigger the scan a non-trivial proportion of the time. It's unreasonable to destructively inspect even a small fraction of these. And why visually inspect? An external inspection will only detect the most amateurish attempts at deception. Commercial packaging requires only brief access to common, inexpensive equipment.

So what good was this inspection? It was intrusive and easily defeated.

No one thought through the implications. Or paid attention to what a pilot program revealed about the impact on security.

Sounds like a poor panettone

They probably do it to everybody hoping they get offered a slice from time to time.

Tisk, tisk - let's not fall into the TSA's NewSpeak trap.

The x-ray scanner most likely showed an object too dense for the x-rays to penetrate. This is typically referred to as an "anomaly" (which I consider a reasonable term). However, it is NOT "something suspicious". It's not suspicious in any way to have objects in your carry-on which are too dense for x-rays to penetrate; there are any number of such objects which are not prohibited or dangerous.

Like panettones, for example.

Or hoping that the passenger will simply hand the whole thing over thinking that it's confiscated.

Panettone and TSA all fruit cakes.

Have you ever seen a panettone - unless someone has baked a file into it the chances of it having anything dense enough for x-rays not to penetrate are zero.