Letter from a Passenger: I Made a Bagful of Peanut Butter Crackers and Was No Longer Considered a Terrorist Threat

I have a backlog of approximately 400 letters from airline passengers and airport security screeners in my inbox. I’m going to be posting several Letter Super-Packs soon, for those of you who have been with this site long enough to remember how I did those after the first time we went viral.

Up first, though, we have a letter from Dan O.

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Hi,

I thank you on behalf of all of us. Keep up the fight, let your readers tell their stories; we can become Big Brother’s Big Brother. What do they say about sunshine being the best disinfectant? The TSA needs a solar storm to clean its moldy mess from top to bottom.

I’ll give you one of my TSA acts in its theater of the absurd, of which I have many. Once when my wife, young son and I had passed through security at LaGuardia, a TSA officer pulled a small jar of peanut butter from my wife’s carry-on and told us we couldn’t take it. She had packed it, figuring it wasn’t a liquid, along with saltines and an “approved” plastic knife so I would have something to eat on the flight because I get sick if I go too long without food and this was a 4-hour flight, no meal.

I knew it would be useless to try to explain it to a TSA-drone; so, at the end of the conveyer belt on top of my suitcase, I opened the saltines, the peanut butter and the knife and made a bagful of peanut butter crackers. That, I suppose eliminated the “peanut butter” security risk. Of course, someone determined to be a threat probably would have had an explosive ready in the form of nicely prepared cheese slice crackers, and, without a doubt, would have passed unquestioned to the plane

Good luck in you adventure.

-Dan O.

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