Lard is used in many cuisines as a cooking fat or shortening, or as a spread similar to butter, it is also commonly used to manufacture soap.

Lard has always been an important cooking and baking staple in cultures where pork is an important dietary item, the fat of pigs often being as valuable a product as their meat. Pure lard is especially useful for cooking since it produces little smoke when heated and has a distinct taste when combined with other foods. Many chefs and bakers deem lard a superior cooking fat or shortening because of lard's range of applications and taste.

Flour is a powder made of cereal grains; it is the main ingredient of bread, pasta, crackers, many cakes, and many other foods. Wheat flour is one of the most important foods in many cultures.

Wheat varieties are called "clean," "white," or "brown" if they have high gluten content, and they are called "soft" or "weak" flour if gluten content is low. Hard flour, or bread flour, is high in gluten, with a certain toughness that holds its shape well once baked. Soft flour is comparatively low in gluten and so results in a finer texture. Soft flour is usually divided into cake flour, which is the lowest in gluten, and pastry flour, which has slightly more gluten than cake flour.

Sugar as a basic food carbohydrate, and commercially produced table sugar comes either from sugar cane or from sugar beet. Sugar may dissolve in water to form a syrup; there are many foods which principally contain dissolved sugar. There are many types of culinary sugars, the common ones include raw sugar, mill white sugar, white refined sugar, brown sugar, and sugar cubes.

Originally, people chewed the cane raw to extract its sweetness. Indians discovered how to crystallize sugar during the Gupta dynasty, around AD 350, and sugarcane was originally from tropical South Asia and Southeast Asia. Most cane sugar comes from countries with warm climates, such as Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Mexico and Australia, the top sugar-producing countries in the world. Beet sugar comes from regions with cooler climates: northwest and eastern Europe, northern Japan, plus some areas in the United States (including California).

Palm oil is an edible plant oil derived from the fruit of the oil palm which is the source of both palm oil (extracted from the fruit) and palm kernel oil (extracted from the seeds). Previously the second-most widely produced edible oil, it may have now surpassed soybean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world. Palm oil is a very common cooking ingredient in the regions where it is produced, and its heavy use in the commercial food industry elsewhere can be explained by its comparatively low price, being one of the cheaper vegetable or cooking oils on the market. It is used as cooking oil, to make margarine and is a component of many processed foods. It is also an important component of many soaps, washing powders and personal care products, is used to treat wounds, and has controversially found a new use as a feedstock for biofuel.

Fertilizers are chemical compounds given to plants to promote growth; they are usually applied either through the soil, for uptake by plant roots, or by foliar feeding, for uptake through leaves. Fertilizers can be organic (composed of organic matter), or inorganic (made of simple, inorganic chemicals or minerals). They can be naturally occurring compounds such as peat or mineral deposits, or manufactured through natural processes (such as composting) or chemical processes (such as the Haber process). These chemical compounds can improve the health and appearance of plants in lawns and gardens as they provide different essential nutrients that typically encourage plant growth.