Ellen Pompeo Held at TSA Over Bag of Sunflower Seeds
Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo says a recent travel mishap taught her an unexpected lesson about airport snacks.
In a new interview with Travel + Leisure, Pompeo, 55, revealed that she was stopped by TSA in March after trying to board a flight with an unopened bag of Erewhon sunflower seeds.
“I had a bag of sunflower seeds, like organic sunflower seeds from Erewhon, so they were probably the most expensive sunflower seeds money can buy,” she says. “They literally held me for an hour, and they brought the bomb squad in.”
Pompeo asked the officials, “What is happening? Is this a joke?” They replied that “it was most likely a chemical on the packaging of these super expensive, fancy, organic, clean sunflower seeds” that triggered the search.
She offered to toss the seeds to avoid further delay, but security officials instead held her until a bomb squad cleared the snack. The ordeal, she said, turned a simple oversight into a full-on security scare.
