Getting a craving for a snack midway through the afternoon can inevitably lead to buying some utterly disgusted product from Frito-Lay or Mars. Even those “natural” chips or organic cookies you got down at the co-op tend to have a bunch of unpronounceable ingredients listed on the package.

One way to avoid this is coming up with your own snack alternatives. I’ve achieved this, to a degree, using a food dehydrator. You can pick one up for $50 or so, but they are also a very popular item to find in a thrift store. I found mine at a Goodwill a couple miles down the road for $15.

Deciding what you want to dehydrate is first. Careful selection of produce is needed to ensure a maximum benefit. For instance: I did a 3 pint packages of strawberries in my first go around, and ended up with less than a pint of dehydrated strawberries. Not the best value when you consider the cost. However, bananas make an excellent choice—they are inexpensive in their whole form, and they dehydrate into very tasty banana chips (much better than the sugar laden ones you buy at the store).

Veggies are also a great avenue to pursue. Almost any veggie dehydrates well. In particular, carrots, green onions, squash, and tomatoes are all good candidates. In addition to making veggie “chips” out of dehydrated veggies, you can also make killer home-made soup mixes. Just dehydrate your veggies, add some spices or herbs (which you can also dehydrate yourself), and voila—instant soup mix without a bunch of chemicals in it!

Utilizing a dehydrator can be very time-consuming. In particular, the chopping of fruits and veggies can take up literally an hour a day or more. Getting into a routine where you can find an hour a day to do so (while you’re in a big dehydrating period) is important. Most items take approximately 24 hours to dehydrate, so finding the same time each day to do your chopping will allow you to get maximum benefit from your dehydrator.

Surprisingly, dehydrators don’t really use that much power. I was running my dehydrator 24 hours a day for about 3 weeks, and my power bill went up maybe a dollar or two. And the added benefits of working towards eliminating processed snacks from my life have more than made up for the time and effort of chopping. My dehydrator has changed the way I think about snacking and storing produce. So go ahead, and give it a try—simplify your food chain and enjoy the benefits of dehydrating your own produce.