The food stuffs that find their place in my weekly grocery shopping cart emphasize basics. Basic ingredients that I can forge into a nutritious and good-tasting meal. I do not ordinarily place into that shopping cart convenience foods, foods that have been processed, pre-prepared, foods that have been so altered from their original state that they barely resemble their origins and purpose.

Fresh rates high on my shopping list. Fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, fish, poultry and grain products. We bake our own bread for the most part, although my husband is partial at times to commercial soft-baked goods that I avoid personally. I have always felt it to be a pleasurable challenge to put edible ingredients together in combinations that taste good and have high-impact nutritional value.

But I deviate completely in one small corner of my shopping cart. In that corner I place a plastic shopping bag and I fill it deliberately with food which still has a nutritional whack, but which has been modified by being put together in combinations prior to sale by food-product manufacturers. Into that bag goes non-perishable food of a type that needs little-to-no home preparation. For in this kind of shopping I am invested in selecting items that are healthy yet require little manipulation before they're presented at a table.

Those food items include crackers, tinned soups, dehydrated soups, canned bean-and-sauce preparations, tins of salmon or tuna, and tins of chicken and ham. Sometimes I include tea, and occasionally boxed bakery products, and always there are boxes of macaroni-and-cheese combinations. At the cashier out-flow they have become accustomed to my asking them to put everything through with my normal shopping, but to keep these items separate for deposit back into the shopping bag they were gathered in.

On my way out of the supermarket, I am then able to expeditiously place the full-and-paid-for bag of non-perishables into the receptacle placed there for eventual collection by this city's Food Bank. It is a small recognition of our personal good fortune with no wish to avoid the realization that so many others are so much less fortunate.