The airport. That fun location between the real world and your trip. A place where everything is designed to part you with as much of your holiday money as possible. One thing many people don’t realise is that you can bring food through airport security.

That’s right, you can save your hard earned cash by bringing some with you for the long wait before your flight, for the flight itself, or both. I’ve done it before and this is what happened.

Bringing Food Through Airport Security

Some Dutch friends of mine came to Ireland so we could take a flight on a Fokker 50. Hey, aviation geeks gotta geek from time to time, right? Anyway, we spent the evening before catching up and having drinks, and were a little on the fragile side when we got to the airport.

At the time, Terminal 1 in Dublin Airport had an eternally popular landside McDonald’s restaurant, which was sadly a casualty of the pandemic. After check-in, we headed up there to get some wraps, nuggets and other bits to satisfy our hunger.


Rather than eat there, we decided to take it all through security and eat at the gate. While in line, we grabbed one of the free liquids bags and popped all of our dips in there and sealed it.

When it was our turn to go through, our bags went through, as did the bag of McDonald’s and the dips. None of the security screening staff batted an eyelid and it all went through fine. At the gate, we stood around eating our landside booty to envious glances from the other passengers.

Overall Thoughts

There you have it, proof that you can take food through airport security. Of course, drinks are prohibited as they’re over the 100ml limit, but savvy travellers are now bringing empty bottles and filling them with water after security. It keeps you hydrated inflight, plus you don’t need to purchase any of the airport drinks.

You could save even more money than we did by purchasing the food you want from your local store and bringing it with you. Either way, there is no problem doing this and it can save you plenty of money. You can also take it on the plane and eat it there, avoiding the buy on board menu as well. The money is better in your pocket, after all!

Have you ever brought food through airport security to save cash at the airport or to bring on the plane with you? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image via Dublin Airport.
McDonald’s Japan by Ryuta Ishimoto via Wikimedia Commons.