I grew up wanting nothing more than potato chips and a Barbie doll. Instead, I was offered Holly Hobbie — the most wholesome, most child-appropriate doll imaginable — and carrot sticks.

The worst part is that I now deny my own child the same junk food I once sought out. He gets chips and candy as treats on vacations, and when he decides to spend his allowance on them instead of saving up for remote-control helium sharks, but his daily life is filled with suggestions that he have an apple if he’s hungry and offers of roasted almonds when what he really wants is Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

So, like plenty of parents around the nation, I’m tempted by the notion of magical snacks that I’ll be OK buying and he’ll be happy eating. Unlike most parents, however, I work as a food writer, and sometimes companies send me their latest “all-natural” creations.

I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so the entire category of treats made with unrefined cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup flies under, over, and around my snack-dar. But anything crispy, crunchy, savory, or salty gets opened and given a shot to impress.

They’re not all good, I’ll say that much. It’s hard to improve upon the humble potato chip. And most things marketed in the “natural snacks” category aren’t necessarily any more natural or less processed than a salted potato chip, which is cause for pause.

The marketing of natural snacks hints at “not processed.” Of course, a fistful of pork fat is completely “natural” by any definition, and even unprocessed (at least before you render it), but there aren’t many who would claim it was “healthful” (and we won’t even touch on the issue of deliciousness in this case). The pushers of “natural” snacks try to focus attention on their all-natural ingredients, but as I examined one of the styrofoam-like “potato” chips covered in bright orange powder that I was admittedly happily snarfing down one day, I decided to write an article about the venn diagram of “natural” and “processed” and “healthful” in the snack world.

Since I was intrigued by process, not ingredients, I wanted to see for myself how various snacks were made. I envisioned teasing out the differences between natural ingredients and levels of processing, to see how these snacks held up to the rubric I use when deciding what to buy: Could I make them at home? In other words, are they made with ingredients readily available to retail consumers and possible to make in a home kitchen?

I chose a trio of crispy, savory local snacks that I actually liked the taste of and started making calls. While Somersault Snack Co. of Sausalito, Calif., was happy to let me see them bake their sunflower seed crackers if I was willing to schlep to their Central Valley factory, neither Popchips nor 479° Popcorn would let me see their snacks get made.

I asked to speak to managers and supervisors. I explained that I’d been in plenty of food manufacturing facilities, from Hodo Soy Beanery’s tofu operation to Lundberg Family Farms’ rice cake factory. I’d gone through soup factories and berry processing plants, commercial bakeries and walnut sorting lines. I’d even been to more than one of the most cautious of all food operations: creameries, where cleanliness is next to solvency and errant microbes are feared more than vampires and natural disasters combined.

On one hand, I could see why Popchips might not want me to see potatoes transformed into air-popped chips — I mean, something slightly funky is going on there, right? (For the record, Popchips cited “safety concerns” as the reason.) But why on earth wouldn’t 479° Popcorn let me see them pop corn?

“It’s a proprietary process,” I was told.

The irony? The folks at 479° had already sent me a sample P.I.Y. (pop it yourself) kit with kernels, seasoning, and instructions on how best to mimic their process in a home kitchen. How terribly secret could what they do in the factory be?

I bill myself as neither reporter nor journalist, and the ease with which I dropped that story is an excellent piece of evidence to support my claim. I did, however, file the idea away as one to follow-up on when I had some more time or came across more candidates to include.

Then The Fancy Food Show came through town last January and, despite the damage I knew it would do to my psyche and faith in humankind, I went. In addition to witnessing the trend of “tea-flavored water” and noting a surge in the availability of lentil chips, I also came across a guy demonstrating how his company (not Popchips) turned potato slices and other starchy discs (tapioca was a player, I remember that) into popped puffs.

Just as the Popchips website says, heat and pressure do the job. To make official Popchip-brand chips, though, they need to first cut potatoes down into pieces about the size of corn kernels, pop them using air pressure as well as heat, and then, along with adding oil and seasonings for flavor, somehow get those smaller pieces of popped potato to come together to form a chip.

Not only could I never do it at home, I don’t much want to.

After that, I went back to drying out kale chips in the oven and my son, the poor little lamb, went back to deciding just how often to sacrifice part of his savings to eat a few handfuls of crispy, crunchy, salty, empty deliciousness engineered to make him crave more.

“They were piled up outside, on sale,” my dad said, “so I knew they were good.”

I make my living advocating the use of fresh, local produce, and I’m the one who cooks when my family gathers at our cabin in Northern Minnesota. So there were several things about my dad hauling a dozen giant melons — honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelons — into the already chock-full galley kitchen out of which I was planning on feeding seven people, plus dinner guests, for the weekend that irked me.

First and most obvious: It was early July. Where we were, above the 45th parallel, melons were simply not in season.

Second, the melons did not, in fact, fit in the kitchen. At all. The cupboards were full, the fridge was jam-packed, and the counters in the kitchen — or, rather, those areas of the counter that the dog couldn’t reach, because my parents’ dog has a singular talent for nabbing food off any surface she can access — were themselves already piled high. The kitchen is small and my mom is known for what can most nicely be called buying amply when we gather. Coffee cakes and rolls and eggs and bacon and yogurt for breakfast, loaves of bread and sliced meats for sandwiches, avocados and salsa and chips and limes and lemons for margaritas and guacamole, various nuts and crackers and cheeses and fruit in case of peckishness, and then, of course, all the food for dinners, each episode of which would most certainly result in leftovers a-plenty.

The melons were, therefore, relegated to a sideboard in the living room.

Third, excuse me, but who on earth buys a dozen melons for seven people for two days? When one considers that my brother won’t touch them, it’s really six people, which means a melon apiece. Each day. By any scenario that’s a lot of melon. In a situation in which other foodstuffs exist — and exist they did, as explained above — it’s patently ridiculous. But I guess we already know who does this: my dad. So perhaps the question we should be asking is why did he do this?

The answer is simple: a good deal to tempt his eye (I believe they were 60 cents a pound) and a complete lack of experience buying groceries. My parents have a fairly traditional division of labor, which means that when my dad does go to a grocery store, it’s usually to get things only he needs. It’s almost always, in fact, to buy his own dinner for that night because my mom is out of town. When he does this he buys food that, by his own description, he doesn’t “have to touch.” That he bought fresh produce at all was, in a way, somewhat miraculous.

He also bought these dozen melons without a plan in the world on what to do with them. And that leads to reason No. 4 that I was peeved: I had just been given a fair amount of work. I could have disregarded the melons, washing my hands of them, but between my intense distaste for food waste (around 40 percent of the food produced in this country doesn’t get eaten) and overdeveloped work ethic, that was hardly likely.

In short, while I wasn’t thrilled that the melons were in the house, I was damn determined to see them get eaten.

I tried to tackle the problem logically. I broke down the biggest watermelon — a real humdinger more suitable for a company picnic than a family weekend — and whirled it in the blender with just a bit of sugar (I have to admit, it was a supremely sweet specimen). I poured the puree into a baking pan, and set it in the freezer to get some granita on.

A cantaloupe was cut into wedges, draped with prosciutto, and added as a first course (“fancy!” proclaimed my brother as he ate the prosciutto off his melon, leaving the orange half-moon untouched) at dinner that night.

Next up: the honeydew. Fruit salad at breakfast. Cubed, drizzled with a light syrup made by diluting some honey with a squirt of lime juice, and topped with fresh mint leaves torn into pieces.

It was hot out, so I turned three melons into aqua fresca and passed tumblers of the pureed and strained melon with or without vodka or tequila — hey, I was willing to play dirty if need be — around to people at lunch and wherever I could find them lounging on decks or sitting on docks throughout the afternoon.

The next night, I made a watermelon and feta salad drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with plenty of freshly ground black pepper. From where I sat at dinner I could see the remaining melons in the living room. Thanks to my melon-loving husband’s valiant efforts (half a melon at breakfast each morning!), we were down to five. Everyone was headed home before dinner the next day. I could feel the still-copious amount of granita sitting in the freezer and I wondered how much more aqua fresca I could trick people into drinking before they packed up and escaped the melon madness.

My mind reeled from the responsibility. And then my dad, who had been a bit skeptical about the salad at first, piped up: “This is really good. You know, I should buy melons more often.”