Think plastic-wrapped American cheese slices, cans of nacho cheese sauce, cheese you can spray out of a can, and those famous bricks of cheese you use to make queso dip.

When it comes to processed cheese, it’s important to note that most of the products you’re familiar with cannot even call themselves “cheese,” but will instead be labeled as a “processed cheese product.” In addition to the milk and cultures you would typically find in real cheese, you also have ingredients like chemical stabilizers to enhance shelf life and make them more easily meltable, along with additional flavoring and coloring agents to make the product seem more like real cheese. Hardly the whole food that we generally regard cheese to be.

The American cheese slices we see in the likes of popular Kraft Singles is not made with at least 51% of real cheese, and, thus, it lacks an official cheese designation. It’s called a “pasteurized cheese product.”