No matter how much your tastes have evolved from the time you were eating school lunches and everything with ketchup, Velveeta probably has a special place in your list of guilty pleasures. It might be one of the most unnatural colors you’ll see in the supermarket, and it might be of a completely questionable texture, but there’s velveeta queso denying that magic happens when you melt it. What’s the deal with this super-processed but super-popular cheese product?

Velveeta wasn’t so much discovered as it was invented, and even stranger is the fact that it’s actually the second cheese invented by Swiss immigrant Emil Frey. At the time, the company had opened another location that mainly produced Swiss cheese. They had a problem, though — it was difficult to sell cheese wheels that were damaged, and that was a lot of product they didn’t want to go to waste. Knowing Frey had already had success creating new cheeses, they sent him some samples and asked him to come up with a product that used these cheese scraps. Frey’s experients didn’t just lead him to a way to use cheese that would otherwise be thrown away, but it also led him to some weird science. Melt most “real” cheese and you’ll end up separating the oil from it in something of — to use the technical term — a yucky mess. Melt Velveeta, though, and you’ll get an amazing guilty pleasure that’s perfect for things like queso.

While that’s what makes cheese, well, cheese, it’s also what makes the fat separate from most cheeses when you melt it. Frey was following in the footsteps of two men named Fritz Settler and Walter Gerber, Swiss researchers who were trying to find a cheese product that would melt. When they added sodium citrate to their cheesey experiments, they found they could melt cheese and reform it into the familiar, Velveeta-shaped block. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the US went from the Great Depression right into World War II and that was on the heels of the first World War. Cheese — got a massive popularity boost at the time because its affordability allowed families to stretch their pennies even farther and still keep food on the table. 9, although many were forced to make do with even less than that. By the time World War II started, milk and cheddar cheese were among the first items to be rationed on the home front.

Each one-pound brick of Velveeta has a recommended 16 servings, and if you look at the nutritional information through 21st century eyes, those servings are pretty terrifying. Velveeta was a 1930s-era superfood, on paper, at least. That’s literal, as the American Medical Association declared Velveeta was chock full of super-nutritious goodness. That was in 1931 and from there, there was no looking back. They put out a whole bunch of recipes to help families get the most out of Velveeta and keep everyone from getting tired of the same, boring old grilled cheese sandwiches. That’s admirable enough, but some of the ideas were just downright bizarre. If you were looking for something to serve at a party, you might have come across Kraft’s suggestion for Hawaiian-inspired party foods, and you can make them right now!

Just take half of a toasted bun, apply a generous layer of peanut butter, add a slice of pineapple, a slice of Velveeta, then leave in the oven enough to melt the cheese. Velveeta was good for breakfast, too, and a Velveeta jelly omelet might have been the perfect way to start your day off right. Most of this recipe doesn’t sound too bad, and it’s basically a 4-egg omelet with Velveeta folded into the eggs. Not all Velveeta recipes are questionable to modern tastes, and if you still use a brick of Velveeta to whip up some queso dip on every occasion you can rationally come up with, you’re in good company.