Peruvian Potatoes Pack a Peck of Problems

Peruvian Potatoes Pack a Peck of Problems

At JFK Airport, Jasper the Beagle Sniffs Out Spud Smugglers

By Leslie Josephs in the Wall Street Journal

Edilberto Soto was nabbed at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport last month with a five-kilo haul from Peru.

The contraband: A rainbow-colored assortment of potatoes from the Andean highlands, near where the tuber was first cultivated millennia ago.

“They took them away from us,” says Mr. Soto, a potato grower who had planned on showcasing the spuds at a food show in Brooklyn.

By “they” Mr. Soto was referring to America’s line of defense against the illicit entry of food products: a team of agricultural specialists and customs officers who use a floppy-eared beagle—wearing a dark blue vest emblazoned with the words “Protecting American Agriculture”—to sniff out contraband, and a massive industrial grinder to destroy it.

One agricultural specialist, Fred Skolnick, a deputy chief, says he sympathizes with offenders for their motives. “People are passionate about food,” he says. “You try taking a salami away from an Italian.”

The illegal foodstuffs are confiscated and passengers could be levied a $300 fine for the infraction, but Mr. Skolnick says that rarely happens. Instead, he says, the JFK team gives suspected perps 10 chances to amend their customs declaration to admit they are carrying agricultural products. (Agents keep trying: “Are you sure you don’t have anything in your bag?…Looks like you might have something, are you sure?”)

Even so, Mr. Skolnick has developed a keen eye for spotting potential smugglers. “Old women in wheelchairs—that’s my first stop,” he says.

In his more than three decades on the job, he says, he has uncovered “whole cow heads, whole sheep heads” and “women wearing salami under their coat.”

The authorities’ aim is simple: protect U.S. agriculture from diseases.

Potatoes are notorious pest-carriers, as their thin skin and the dirt that clings to it can carry myriad diseases, like the potato blight that sparked a famine in Ireland in the 1840s.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plant-safety unit, fresh potatoes can be imported into the contiguous 48 states only from Canada and Mexico. A few other suppliers feed some of the U.S. Caribbean and Pacific islands.

But it’s a tough-to-swallow restriction for many picky-palated Peruvians living here, who can easily obtain other Peruvian products like quinoa. The potato is a pillar of Peruvian cuisine, with close to 3,000 varieties grown there, according to the International Potato Center in Lima.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection make more seizures of potatoes from airline passengers arriving from Peru than from any other country, according to the agency’s data. Agents reported 21 potato seizures from passengers on flights from Peru in the year ended Sept. 30, 2013, according to the most up-to-date customs data, up 31% from the previous year.

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Many Peruvians chalk up the spud-smuggling to their deep love of their diverse cuisine, particularly of potato-based dishes, like causa: mashed potatoes, crowned with spiced mixtures of everything from shrimp to octopus to beef.

“We’re a very potato-based country,” says Tania Quevedo, who works at her family’s Peruvian Import Co., in New Jersey, importing Peruvian food for restaurants.

When chef Alex Rojas opened Jora, a Peruvian restaurant in the Long Island City section of Queens this summer, he says he was grilled by his Peruvian clientele. He had to admit to using Idaho potatoes to make his causa.

“I couldn’t lie to them,” he says, adding that the Idaho version isn’t the same as the yellow Peruvian potato, whose texture, he says, is creamier.

Victor Albisu, the chef and owner of Del Campo, a Peruvian restaurant in Washington says the Yukon Gold potatoes he uses to make lomo saltado—a beef stir fry with sliced potatoes—are denser than the yellow potatoes of Peru.

The potato then “becomes [just a] part of the dish, not the star of the dish.”

The potato is on a long list of agricultural and animal products seized by U.S. authorities at international airports, including oddities such as “bovine blood plasma” or “bird nest.”

Jasper is one of five passenger-baggage beagles at JFK—larger breeds work the mail and cargo area.

Chosen for their personable nature, the beagles are adopted from shelters, and are trained to learn “The Five Odors”: beef, pork, mango, apple and citrus, according to customs.

Jasper weaves in and out of baggage carts and sits when he smells food. For that, he is rewarded with a treat—although his handler admits, “Sometimes he sits when he wants a treat.”

The final step for the confiscated food: the Muffin Monster, a giant industrial grinder with whirring, hardened-steel blades. The machine’s maker says each blade has more than 2,000-pounds of cutting force at the tooth tip.

The grinder chops up several hundred pounds of food a week. The officers push food from a metal counter into the grinder using wood-handled brushes. “If you put your hand in there you’ll come back with nothing left,” says Mr. Skolnick.

There are other risks, such as the liquid spray in your face. Grinding up hot peppers “will be like you’re getting Maced,” he adds.

Meanwhile, even though Peruvian potato lovers hope for a change in the law, it’s unlikely to come. Blair Richardson, chief executive of the U.S. Potato Board, an industry group, says it “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to import potatoes from Peru because U.S. growers now produce varieties that share roots with ones in the Andean country, including the famous purple ones. “We can get them here,” he says.

Conrado Jose Falco Scheuch, an economist at the Commercial Office of Peru in New York, a government agency, says potatoes are too low-price to bother to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture for their admission.

That has left some disappointed diners.

Lizzie da Trinidade-Asher, president of Macchu Pisco, an importer of Peruvian grape brandy, says her 99-year-old grandmother, who lives in the U.S., refuses to prepare causa for her, even on her birthday, with American potatoes.

“She sees American potatoes and she starts to cry,” says Ms. da Trinidade-Asher.