As we saw in Chapter 20, fats are esters of glycerol, with long-chain fatty acids having 10 to 20 carbon atoms in their chains. Tristearin, the most common animal fat, is shown to the right. The three chains on one glycerol molecule do not have to be identical; mixed fats are possible. Vegetable fats from plants generally have short chains that are unsaturated (with C=C double bonds) or polyunsaturated (with several C=C bonds). The double bonds, which almost invariably are in the cis configuration, introduce kinks into the chains. Because these short, bent chains do not pack together well in a solid, vegetable fats tend to be oily liquids. In contrast, animal fats have longer, saturated fatty acid chains that pack efficiently to form waxy solids such as lard and tallow. Oily vegetable fats can be "hardened" by hydrogenation, that is, by adding H₂, across the double bonds with a catalyst, thereby producing saturated chains with the kinks straightened out.

It was mentioned in Chapter 20 that an alcohol can be esterified with an inorganic acid just as well as with a carboxylic acid. If glycerol is esterified with two fatty-acid molecules and one molecule of phosphoric acid, the result is phosphatidic acid (centre button), the simplest phospholipid. This can be thought of as a "super fatty acid." Long-chain alcohols are partly hydrophobic and partly polar but uncharged (left button), fatty acids are half hydrophobic and half negatively charged, and phosphatidic acid has twice the hydrocarbon chains and twice the negative charge per molecule. These phospholipids are the raw materials of membrane structures.