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A lot of precooked bacon in the US is cooked in a microwave. The slices ride a conveyor belt through a row of microwave ovens. A line can stretch 70 feet or more, and the bacon comes out the other end fully cooked. Hormel lists the cure on Black Label Fully Cooked Bacon as water, salt, sugar, sodium erythorbate and sodium nitrite. Sodium erythorbate speeds up the nitrite reaction, so the pink color sets faster and fewer nitrosamines form when bacon is fried. USDA requires 550 parts per million of it, or sodium ascorbate, in injected bacon. Hormel says the bacon doesn't need refrigeration until it's opened, and the box is 2.52 ounces. Under USDA labeling policy, fully cooked bacon can weigh no more than 40% of the uncured belly. That box started as at least 6.3 ounces of raw belly. Hormel's fully cooked bacon for restaurants, Bacon 1, heats on a 350°F flat top in 30 seconds a side.

In-N-Out makes its own hamburger patties, in its own plants. The company buys whole chucks, takes the bones out, grinds the meat and forms the patties there. Then they're delivered to the restaurants on In-N-Out's own trucks. It opened its first patty plant in 1963 and now has plants in California, Texas and Colorado. In-N-Out says its restaurants get fresh, never-frozen ingredients delivered throughout the week. The company has said for years that it won't open a store farther than it can truck fresh patties from its own plants. When it announced Tennessee in 2023, Lynsi Snyder said its meat plant in Lancaster, Texas, would supply patties to the Tennessee stores. The fries are cut from whole potatoes in each restaurant. The menu board has 3 burgers, fries, shakes and drinks.

Your can of Bruce's Yams is sweet potatoes. The front says Yams in big letters and Cut Sweet Potatoes in Syrup under it. The ingredients are sweet potatoes, water and sugar. The sweet potato is in the morning glory family. A true yam is from a different plant family and has tough, scaly skin, and you'll usually find it in international markets. True yams are Dioscorea, a genus of more than 600 species. Sweet potatoes are Ipomoea batatas, from Central and South America. FDA's standard for canned sweet potatoes, names the food sweet potatoes, with the form, like cut, printed right next to it. In the 1930s, LSU researchers and Louisiana growers started marketing Louisiana's soft, orange sweet potatoes nationally as yams, to set them apart from the firmer, white-fleshed ones grown farther north. Soft sweet potatoes were called yams in the US before that, because they looked like the yams in Africa, according to the Library of Congress. Bruce Foods, a Louisiana company, sold the brand and its sweet potato canning to McCall Farms in 2013. McCall packs the cans in Effingham, South Carolina, and says the sweet potatoes are grown in North and South Carolina.

A carton of USDA graded eggs can be 7 weeks old on its sell-by date. Eggs that carry the USDA grade shield have to be eggs of current production when they're packed, which federal rules define as no more than 21 days old. The 3 digit number on the end of the carton is the pack date, the day of the year they were packed, so 305 is November 1. A sell-by or expiration date can be no more than 30 days from that pack date, counting the pack day. A use-by or best-by date can run to 45 days. So an egg can be 21 days old when it's packed and still be inside its sell-by date 29 days later. USDA grading is voluntary, and eggs packed outside it follow state rules instead of these.

Goodles gets its 14 g of protein by stirring protein powder into the pasta. The macaroni is wheat flour, chickpea protein, wheat protein, then nutrients extracted from broccoli, spinach, kale, pumpkin, sweet potato, sunflower seed, cranberry, chlorella and 2 mushrooms. The sauce is a cheddar blend with disodium phosphate and annatto, paprika and turmeric for color, then butter, salt, tapioca flour, dried maple syrup and lactic acid. Kraft's pasta is enriched wheat and durum flour, and Kraft's sauce is whey, milkfat, salt, milk protein concentrate and phosphates with the same 3 colors. So the protein is wheat protein and chickpea protein mixed into the flour, the same way a protein bar gets its number. The 7 g of fiber comes from a high fiber wheat flour. The 21 nutrients are vitamins and minerals processed out of those plants. Goodles counts a serving as 2.6 oz of dry mix and Kraft counts 2.2 oz. Ounce for ounce they have the same calories, Goodles has slightly less sodium, about 50% more protein and about 6 times the fiber, and it costs about 3 times as much per ounce. It's a fortified mac and cheese that tastes like the regular kind, which isn't easy to pull off.