Yesterday I did a little shopping. Here's the list of what I got:

24 whole frozen chickens
48 1-pound packages of ground turkey
72 20-ounce cans of pineapple
48 16-ounce cans of sliced peaches
48 16-ounce cans of corn
48 16-ounce cans of carrots
60 10-ounce packages of coffee
40 1 quart cartons of “shelf stable” milk
24 20-ounce packages of oatmeal
36 packages of macraroni and cheese
36 24-ounce jars of Bush’s chili with beans
4 banana boxes full of assorted cans of tuna, ham, beans and other high-protein foods
24 46-ounce cans of grapefruit juice
24 5-pound bags of sugar

You may be thinking we have awfully big appetites here, but that wasn't for the house, of course, that was my semi-monthly shopping trip to the Greater Boston Food Bank to get food for our local St. Vincent de Paul pantry. We used to be able to go once per month, but now I go twice, plus we but some meat from the New England Serve folks to supplement this. The local bread outlet store also supplies us with a lot of "day old" bread, and we get donations each week from the parishioners. And still, we often don't seem to have enough. One week in May we had 24 families call for help! And we are one of at least a dozen food pantries in this small city of 100K.