Earlier last year, a criminal cheese gang made international headlines when the Russian police busted it for hauling $30 million of contraband cheddar. With Vladimir Putin’s ban on Western food products, Russians have been getting creative about procuring their beloved banned cheeses. Sound nutty? The U.S. also has a list of banned cheeses—primarily because of health concerns—resulting in a black market where cheese delicacies can be had if you know where to look and are willing to pay up.

“The rule in the U.S. is that you can import cheeses that are aged more than 60 days, like Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino,” says Dino Borri, purchasing director for Eataly USA, which stocks roughly 300 different types of (legal) cheeses in its U.S. outposts in New York City and Chicago. What types of cheeses are ruled out? “The FDA rule in the U.S. is that you can’t import fresh cheese that is not pasteurized.” This means that raw (unpasteurized) cheeses aged less than 60 days—many of which are some of the best kinds out there—are not currently allowed to be produced or imported here in the States.

The ongoing issue is a quite long and very complicated one. For instance, the 60-day aging rule in the U.S. dates back to 1949, and things escalated in 1996 when the FDA reported that bacteria could survive longer than 60 days in raw milk cheeses and the U.S. pushed for an all-out international ban on them. There’s too much to get into here, but in short, the FDA says, “Raw milk is milk made from cows, sheep, or goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. This raw, unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, which are responsible for causing numerous food-borne illnesses.” On the flip side, raw milk proponents (a group that includes raw food obsessives, artisanal cheese-makers, and cheese enthusiasts, among others) believe it not only helps prevent ailments like heart disease and various types of allergies, but also makes for the most unique and expressive cheeses. “Natural bacteria in raw milk, and the other microflora present in dairy before heat treatment, lend a great deal of the flavor to the final product,” says the Oldways Cheese Coalition, an international group of retailers and cheese-makers dedicated to raw milk cheeses and other traditional cheeses.

While there are some phenomenal, domestically produced raw milk artisanal cheeses that are made in accordance with the FDA guidelines, cheese obsessives still want the extra-good stuff and are finding their own ways to get their hands on it. Some are lugging back their oozing raw milk Brie in their suitcases. “My friend brought cheeses back from France that we can’t get here, so I bought them off her,” said one fromage lover, who requested that her name be withheld from this article. Others score their illicit cheese through gourmet food stores and websites (Fromages.com has reportedly sold cheeses that are not legal here), and occasionally they get it from underground food clubs or from people making small batches of it here in the U.S. and selling it. “There was a guy [in upstate New York] who was making contraband raw milk Camembert,” Clark Wolf told The New Yorker. “It was incredibly good, but we always wondered if we would be dead the next day.” (It should be noted that said cheese-maker quickly moved on to a new career path, out of fear he would be hunted down by the FDA.)