Are The New 'Illegal' Chips Actually Made With Illegal Ingredients?

If you live in the United States, you'll probably have an incredibly hard time getting your hands on illegal food. According to Eat This, Not That!, diners across America will likely have issues digging into shark fins, beluga caviar, haggis, or sea turtles. These taboo and forbidden ingredients can easily tempt the palettes of adventurous eaters, and one bold snack company has now found a safe middle ground that gives consumers a taste of forbidden foods without getting slapped with a fine or jail sentence.

Food & Wine reports that the MSCHF art collective has developed a trio of chips based on illegal ingredients. The New York City-based group gained notoriety for putting a pizza inside a skateboard deck and collaborating with Lil Nas X on a line of Satan Shoes, and now it looks to push the limits of food with a very limited-edition line of chips based around the flavors of horse meat, poisonous fugu pufferfish, and casu marzu, an Italian cheese made with maggots. The collective aimed for a trio of surf, turf, and dairy, and at one time, considered making a chip flavor centered on the ortolan, a protected songbird that traditionally gets eaten whole. Shockingly, the chips allegedly taste just like the real thing, with one reviewer noting that the horse chips unmistakably have the flavor of the animal's meat. With such bold flavors, one might suspect that the illegal chips feature actual illegal ingredients.

If you manage to get your hands on a bag or three of these snacks, take comfort in knowing that the chips don't feature any real horse, fugu, or casu marzu. According to Food & Wine, MSCHF partnered with Josh Scherer, the host of "Mythical Kitchen," to create products that taste just like the real thing. Scherer had the pleasure of tasting some of the actual namesake ingredients in the past and helped the art collective create the snack over a year ago. The production faced supply shortages due to the niche products required to imitate the illegal ingredients, but in the end, each chip completely uses artificial ingredients to mimic tastes.

Illegal Chips sells the trio of flavors — plus a fourth mystery bag — for $12 while supplies last. And according to the FAQ section, the horse meat and fugu flavors qualify as vegan, the casu marzu flavor is vegetarian, and all flavors qualify as kosher. If you ever wanted to push your limits with some taboo snacks, this art collective's product might just raise the bar on chip flavors.