Potato chips are, as a general rule, fried, greasy and unfortunately addictive, as illustrated by the longtime Lay's slogan "bet you can't eat just one. All these traits make them the bane of many health food activists' existences, but those same activists might go a little easier on the popular snack food if they knew you can easily make a non-fried, fat free version that is just as crispy as the "real" thing at home All you need is a microwave.

This Japanese potato chip maker allows you to make chips in the microwave. All you need to do is slice up a potato into fine rounds and place in the stand, then microwave until crisp.

It sounds implausible, but microwaving chips really does work. I've done it myself with great success thanks to the recipe for Uncle Bill's Microwave Potato Chips, which doesn't require a potato chip stand to work. The chips actually do crisp up well, especially if you take care to slice them thinly and evenly. In the photo above, the chips that I made are on the left, while the chips made with the chip-maker (not made by me) are on the right. I cut my potatoes freehand with a sharp knife, but using a mandoline will produce results even faster and guarantee consistency. Make sure to season your chips with salt and pepper or seasoning salt before microwaving them, as it is difficult to get the salt to adhere to already crisp chips.

Yogurt is a great base for dips because it is so versatile, like a blank canvas. You can add it to avocados for an ultra-creamy guacamole, use it tone down hot salsas and use it on its own, as I have done here, to showcase other flavors.

Like many yogurt dips, this one is incredibly easy to make. It has only a few ingredients and requires little more than a stir to bring it together, yet it as at least as satisfying as those "ranch-style" dips that often turn up at parties. It goes well with potato chips, pita chips, crackers and veggies.

• The Quick and Easy Artichoke dip from Simply recipes has four ingredients, is served hot and is ready in under 15 minutes.
• Mango Salsa has a fresh, Southwestern flavor from mango, corn, red onions and chilies.
• Similar to the salsa above, this Black Bean Salsa has corn, onions and peppers mixed in with black beans, for a heartier dip.
• Roasted Strawberry and Tomato Salsa is another fruity, but savory, dip. It features deep flavors from the roasted berries and heat from chipotle peppers.
• Susan's Artichoke Hearts and Roasted Red Pepper Dip is almost like a variation on hummus, made with tahini and blended until smooth, though it includes no beans.
• Spinach Parmesan Dip is always a hit at parties. Serve it with crackers or blue corn tortilla chips.
• French Onion Dip (pictured) is made from packet mixes all too often. Even though it's easy to use the pre-mixed spices, those versions won't compare with this homemade one.
• Too Many Chefs' Spicy Peanut Sauce is a great choice for dipping crudites, providing something a little different from standard ranch-type dips. It can also double as a dip for chicken wings.

Krinkle Sticks are krinkle-cut potato snacks made from real potatoes. Light and crisp, the sticks are baked, not fried, and have at least 75% less fat than the regular potato chips with only 2.5 grams of fat per cup. They are free from saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, gluten and preservatives, as well. The Krinkle Sticks come in four flavors: Classic Sea Salt (salt with a touch of pepper and garlic), Sour Cream and Onion (just what it sounds like!), Old School Bar-b-Que (garlic, paprika, tomato, onion, mesquite and red pepper) and Cajun Kaboom (lots of black, white and red peppers).

The brand-new products aren't available in many stores yet, but you can order them online from the company.

When Kettle Chips decides to introduce a new flavor, they often create a "party pack" of unreleased flavors and let you - the consumer - vote for your favorite. The downside to this is that if your favorite flavor isn't the one that is chosen, you know exactly what you're missing out on, but it's still interesting to try the experimental flavors. The Passport to Flavor Pack is their newest selection. It includes five 5-oz. bags of chips in Royal Indian Curry, Dragon 5 Spice, Aztec Chocolate, Island Jerk and Twisted Chili Lime flavors, as well as a world music sample CD ("A Taste of Putumayo: Music for Every Palate"), food and drink pairing ideas and a chip clip so that you can seal up any uneaten chips. The pack is $19.95 and after you've tried the different flavors, you can go to Passport To Flavor to vote for the one you'd most like to see on store shelves next summer.

On Thursday morning, residents of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina were in for a bit of a surprise, especially those who liked Doritos. A damaged tractor-trailer-size shipping container washed up on the beach, bringing with it thousands of bags of the Doritos -- Cool Ranch, Nacho Cheese and Spicy Nacho -- that it contained. Locals, from shopkeepers to fishermen, grabbed as many bags as they could carry from the water and from where they lay strewn on the sand. One person even filled up a pickup truck with them - all in the name of "helping with cleanup," of course. The chips were almost entirely undamaged, thanks to their airtight packaging.

The feeding frenzy only lasted through the morning, as the container was secured, still containing an undetermined number of bags of chips, by the late afternoon. The boat that lost the container has not been tracked down yet, although the missing shipment is sure to be noticed when the crew reaches its eventual destination.

Potatoes are the most popular vegetable in the US and most of them are eaten in some fried form, such as potato chips or french fries. One medium potato represents one of the five servings of vegetables that you are supposed to eat every day, and it doesn't take many french fries to reach the size of a single potato. Because of this, it is not impressive to hear that companies like Frito-Lay and Kraft want to add vegetable-based chips and snacks to their product lines. The potato chips are already vegetable-based!

Adding dehydrated vegetables to snacks like Roasted Vegetable Ritz Crackers is just a way of getting consumers to buy more by capitalizing on a trend for an increased awareness for healthy eating. This doesn't mean that people are necessarily eating healthier, but they think that they are/should be. They will opt for the chip that has some additional "vegetables" in it because it sounds like it might be healthier, regardless of whether it actually is. One trend tracking company said "this may replace the whole-grain fad."

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

Baked chips, when compared to regular fried chips, lack a certain something. They don't have the flavor or texture of regular chips and this is especially true in the case of tortilla chips. Eating Well set out to taste test some healthier chips and noticed, when reading the labels, that not all fried chips are equally "bad" for you - and many had more fiber and less sodium than their flavorless baked counterparts, with only a few more grams of fat. Out of 20 different chips tested, they picked out their top choices.

• RW Garcia Stone Ground (140 cal., 4g fat/.5g saturated, 4g fiber per 1-oz serving) - This brand got the "smart choice" award from the reviewers, who described them as being "authentic" and having a "great corn flavor." As an added bonus, each serving only had 40mg of sodium, the lowest in the test group.
• Santitas White Corn (130 cal., 6g fat/1g saturated, 1g fiber per 1-oz serving) - Salty, corny and crunchy, these chips actually had less sodium than most of the chips in the taste test. They weren't high in the fiber department, though.

A banana chip is a thin, deep-fried slice of banana. Once fried, the slightly sweet chips are crisp (often bordering on rock-hard) and oily. Because they look like fruit, some people mistake these for a healthy snack, but they are far from good for you. A one ounce serving has about 150 calories and 9.5 grams of fat, almost all of it saturated.

On Trader Joe's top 100 list, they included something called banana crisps. I only tried them recently, since nearby Trader Joe's seemed to be perpetually sold out of them. Unlike the traditional deep-fried diet disasters, these chips are baked. They are ultra-thin and akin to an ordinary potato chip in both looks and flavor, and actually make a great substitute for regular potato chips because they don't taste very banana-like at all, though they are slightly sweet rather than salty. Best of all, each one ounce (2/3 cup) serving has only 40 calories and 1 gram of fat.

[Banana crisp image via Trader Joe's Fan, which has a great review of them, too)