The words on the label that sound like food, but aren't.

I want to tell you about three words you've seen a thousand times without ever really seeing them.

They appear on the back of almost every package in the supermarket. They sound wholesome, or scientific, or vaguely familiar in a way that makes you assume they must be fine. They pass through your eyes without setting off any alarms. That is exactly what they were designed to do.

This is what I learned when I actually started reading the ingredient lists on my old grocery cart. Not the front of the package. The back. The small letters. What I found is that most of what we call "food" today contains a growing category of ingredients that are not lies, but are not exactly what they sound like either. They occupy a strange middle ground: legally accurate, technically food-safe, and almost completely uninformative about what you're actually putting in your body.

Let me show you three of them.

"Natural flavors."

Look at almost any label right now. It's the fourth most common ingredient in the American food supply.

The phrase "natural flavors" is defined by the FDA in a regulation called 21 CFR 101.22. That's real. There is a legal definition. But if you actually read what the regulation permits, the word "natural" starts to shrink until it means almost nothing you would recognize.

Here's what "natural flavor" is legally allowed to be. Any flavoring substance derived from a plant or animal source, including bark, leaves, roots, meat, seafood, eggs, dairy, and yeast. That part sounds fine. What's easier to miss is that the same regulation allows the manufacturer to use synthetic solvents like propylene glycol, artificial preservatives, and other undisclosed processing chemicals, all under the same two-word banner. A "natural flavor" can be extracted using industrial chemistry, mixed with dozens of other undisclosed compounds, and still legally be listed as one thing on your label.

There's another problem. A single line of "natural flavors" can hide dozens of individual chemical compounds. The Center for Science in the Public Interest documented in a 2024 report that there are thousands of flavor substances currently in commercial use in the United States that have never been formally evaluated by the FDA for safety, and they are hidden inside terms like "natural flavor," "artificial flavor," and "spices." Because the term is opaque, the FDA doesn't know exactly what's in it. The public certainly doesn't. And the manufacturer isn't required to say.

I'm not telling you natural flavors are poison. I don't have the evidence for that. What I'm telling you is that if your reason for reading a label is to know what you're eating, "natural flavors" doesn't actually tell you.

"Citric acid."

This one surprised me the most.

If you read "citric acid" on a label, you probably picture a lemon. That's what I did. The name is Latin for citrus. It's in every soda, sauce, canned soup, dried fruit bag, and most processed foods on the shelf.

Here's what it actually is today. Around ninety percent of the citric acid in the global food supply is produced through industrial fermentation using a mold called Aspergillus niger. The mold is fed sugar, usually from corn, in large sterile tanks. It ferments the sugar into citric acid. The mold is filtered out, the acid is purified, and the resulting powder goes into your food.

That process was pioneered in 1917 by a food chemist named James Currie, who discovered that A. niger could produce citric acid far more cheaply than pressing it from lemons. Within a couple of years, the industrial process took over almost the entire global market. Today, citric acid is a multi-billion-dollar industry produced almost entirely from mold fermentation of sugar, not from fruit.

I want to be fair here. Chemically, the citric acid produced by mold fermentation is identical to the citric acid in a lemon. The molecule is the molecule. There is nothing dangerous about the process, and the mold itself is filtered out of the final product.

But that's not the point. The point is that the word on the label evokes a fruit, and the reality on the label is a mold farm. Those are not the same picture. If a label read "acid produced by industrial mold fermentation of GMO corn," it would trigger a different reaction than "citric acid." The word does work that the process wouldn't.

"Cellulose."

If you buy pre-shredded cheese, look at the ingredient list. Somewhere near the end, you'll see the word "cellulose," or one of its variants: microcrystalline cellulose, cellulose gum, or carboxymethyl cellulose.

Cellulose is a real thing. It's a plant fiber, and in nature it comes from the cell walls of fruits, vegetables, grains, and other plants. Celery is famously high in it. In that form, it's part of a whole food and it works the way plant fiber is supposed to work in your digestion.

That is not, however, where the cellulose in your shredded cheese comes from. The cellulose used as a food additive in the American food supply is most commonly refined from wood pulp, or in some cases cotton lint, using acid hydrolysis and industrial processing. It has been approved by the FDA since 1973 as a Generally Recognized as Safe additive. It is used to prevent shredded cheese from clumping, to add texture and bulk to low-fat products, to help low-calorie foods feel substantial, and as a cheap filler to replace ingredients that cost more.

In 2016, an FDA fraud investigation revealed that a company called Castle Cheese Inc. had been using such high levels of wood-pulp cellulose in its "100% grated Parmesan" products that class action lawsuits followed. The company had used the additive not for texture but as a straight financial substitute for actual cheese. The scandal was a rare moment when the practice became visible.

Again, I'm not going to tell you that cellulose is toxic. It isn't. It passes through your body largely undigested and is legally food-safe. What I will tell you is this: if you looked at "cellulose" on your cheese label and pictured a plant, you were picturing the wrong thing. It's much more likely to be wood.

The pattern.

Here's what I want you to notice. In all three cases, the word on the label is not a lie. Natural flavors are, technically, derived from natural sources. Citric acid is, chemically, the same molecule as the acid in a lemon. Cellulose is, biologically, the same fiber that appears in a plant.

But in all three cases, the word does more work than the reality supports. It carries associations, images, and reassurances that don't match what's actually in the container. And it does that work quietly, on the back of the package, in small letters, next to two dozen other words that are doing exactly the same job.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a system. A system that has evolved slowly, over decades, as food companies figured out which words they could use to satisfy the letter of the labeling law while carrying the emotional connotations of real food. The system works because most people don't have time to Google every word on every label they buy.

I don't blame anyone for not doing that. I didn't do it for most of my life either. But once I understood what I was actually reading, I started making different choices at the store.

What I do now.

I buy less packaged food. Not because packaged food is universally bad, but because the labels have become so full of engineered language that reading them takes more time than I have and produces less information than I need.

When I want cheese, I buy a block and shred it myself. It takes an extra thirty seconds, and there's no cellulose to worry about. When I want something acidic in a recipe, I use lemon juice or vinegar. When I want flavor in what I cook, I use actual herbs and spices, whole, that I can see and smell and identify.

And the products I built at Fatly Good, the ghee, the tallow, the peanut butter, and the almond butter, have one ingredient each. There are no words on the back label that need translating. There is no "natural flavor" hiding a proprietary blend. There is no "citric acid" produced from mold. There is no "cellulose" from wood pulp.

There is just the food. Which is what a label should describe in the first place.

Fat never felt so right.

Gustavo Rodriguez, Founder