A few weeks ago we celebrated Thanksgiving. It’s just a typical work day here so we always celebrate it on the Saturday directly afterwards. We get together with several other families and do the whole thing.
Stuffing, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce. And, of course, turkey. Turkey’s a lunch meat here. No one really cooks a bird whole. Our first year we made it work with a scrawny
specimen that the farmer killed specially for us.
It was like a wild turkey is in the US which, last I knew, no one
actually eats. The second year we
learned that in Germany it's possible to get a frozen one, similar to a US turkey but about half the size, which is just as well since a US bird wouldn’t fit
in a Swiss oven. That worked well so every year since I order one from the German supermarket and pick it up a few days before we cook it. This year, as we were expecting around 30 people, I ordered
two. As usual, the Wednesday beforehand I zipped across the border on the way home from work to pick them up, While I was waiting for them
to be brought out I looked
over some information the store had and saw that the import limits had changed. For all of the time we’ve
lived here, poultry was treated differently than beef with regards to how much
you could bring into Switzerland. The
brochure I was reading, however, noted that now, meat was meat, meaning that even for poultry there was a 1 kg limit. As such, for each kilogram over there is an import duty of CHF 18 (roughly $18 now). The two turkeys I was waiting for were close to 12 kg total. Some
quick math told me that they were going to cost, in addition to the purchase
price, about $200 just to bring them over the border. Unless …. I smuggled them. We’ve generally been pretty law abiding citizens here. Keep our noses clean, that’s been
our strategy. This, however, turned
me. I couldn’t help it. I was breaking bad. I became a turkey trafficker.
