It is amazing how much food two people are capable of consuming. Two people of modest height and equally modest girth. Two physically active people, but aged over three-score-and-ten. I scan the total of our weekly shopping, contained in three fairly large black plastic baskets for conveyance, and just wonder at the fact that we eat it all.

Oh, of course we share our home with two very small dogs. Their food intake is slight in comparison to ours, needless to say.

We share the shopping, because it is a pleasure, not quite a chore, both of us making careful selection of what we feel we will need to sustain us throughout the course of a week, and what can be used to make nutritious, good-tasting meals. When we get home with our shopping, I usually look over the receipt to ensure there have been no errors, and there rarely are, but for those on occasion for which whoever feeds the input into the computer system errs with.

We're blessed, in Canada, with a wide variety of foods; whole foods is what we mostly focus on. And it is those whole foods that are mainly reflected in our receipt for items purchased. We are able to make a wide array of fresh food choices because this country imports fruits and vegetables that are in season in other countries, giving us more than ample choice throughout the year, when our own growing season is in winter abeyance.

Another thing about our food availability; it is so relatively inexpensive. If consumers veer away from pre-prepared and convenience foods in favour of whole foods, they eat better, more healthfully and pay substantially less for their nutritional needs.

We are ourselves not vegetarian, although we do make an effort to refrain from eating red meat; we may do so once or twice a week, no more. We look to poultry and fish and cheeses for our main sources of protein, supplemented by eggs, beans and rice.

And on looking over that food shopping receipt it is striking just how much of our purchases are represented by fresh fruits and vegetables. This past week's is an example; the baskets contain, among other things, green leaf lettuce, mandarins, navel oranges (all from the American south) cauliflower, pineapple (Costa Rica), bananas, carrots, green beans, yellow onions, green, yellow, orange and red bell peppers, white button mushrooms, yellow potatoes, sugar snap peas, snow peas (Guatemala), zucchini, asparagus, cantaloupe, tomatoes, raspberries, avocados, red grapes, garlic (China).

There seems little logical reason in Canada why people cannot eat well if they exercise their options to do so; it is less costly and certainly wholesome. We bought coffee cream, Earl Grey tea, mozzarella cheese, garlic-onion bagels, omega 3 eggs, whiting fish, provolone cheese, orange juice and cranberry juice, cream cheese, lean ground beef and lean ground pork, ricotta cheese and chicken breasts.

Next week our choices will be slightly different in the non-vegetable-fruits category, but the fruits and vegetable choices remain fairly uniform. And to us, most satisfactory.