If you’ve ever perused an ingredient list and wondered why there’s polyglycerol polyricinoleate in your candy bar or tertiary-butylhydroquinone in your cereal–or what, exactly, those things are–a new book has the answers.

Ingredients includes close-up photos of 75 common additives, along with descriptions of their origins and use. Ethylenediaminetetracetic acid sucks up any trace metals in food to stop oxidation. Disodium inosinate multiplies the umami taste of MSG by a factor of six or eight. Carrageenen, made from seaweed flour, binds up fats and proteins in chocolate milk and is also used in everything from salad dressing to beer (and air fresheners, shoe polish, and personal lubricant).

The book, which will come out in September, wasn’t intended as a polemic on the potential evils of additives. It’s more of a simple exploration of ingredients that most of us know nothing about, even if we’re eating them on a regular basis.

Corn is used to make more food additives than any ingredient other than petroleum: Flour added to wheat flour to make it last longer, cornstarch, chemically altered “modified cornstarch,” and maltodextrin for thickening food, corn syrup, and high-fructose corn syrup, used for moisture and shelf life in addition to sweetness.

“My goal for this project from the very beginning was to take an expository stance on the subject matter,” says photographer Dwight Eschliman. “Food science has created some catastrophes for sure, but it’s also created some amazing things. Right now it’s everyone’s favorite whipping post. There are a lot of people out there with strong opinions; I simply wanted to share information.”

“Dwight and I both really are just curious guys,” says author Steve Ettlinger, who worked on the book with Eschliman and has also written the similar work, Twinkie, Deconstructed. “We’re fascinated by this stuff.”

They got to know each ingredient intimately in the studio. At one point, when Eschliman photographed an accidentally concentrated form of diacetyl, they had to evacuate the area. “Smelly stuff,” Eschliman says.

Ettlinger was fascinated to learn about taurine, named for the Latin word for bull (taurus), which was originally made from bull semen–and which happens to be part of Red Bull, whose fans like to cling to the urban legend that they’re drinking something sourced from bull testicles.