STRETCHING A DOLLAR

Stephanie Ansberry of Cape Girardeau watched her son, Stephen, 8, fill a container with rolled oats from a 50-pound bag that she bought as a member of the Food For Us Buying Club.

Stephanie Ansberry says saving money isn't the end purpose in her belonging to a food co-op. The end purpose is being able to be home with her children and live within her family's means.

If she didn't pay attention to costs, she says, she would probably have to work outside the home.

Some five years ago Ansberry answered a Southeast Missourian classified ad about a meeting to organize a food co-op. She went to the meeting, and the Food For Us Buying Club was organized with five families.

She's been with it since. In fact, Ansberry, the mother of five children ranging in age from 4 months to 10 years, spends about $100 a month ordering from a catalog from a food distributor in Wisconsin.

She thinks the money she saves by her planning and being in the co-op allows the family to take a vacation, usually to Florida, every other year, and for her to home school her children.

"If I didn't pay attention to costs," she says, "we couldn't afford a vacation."

Ansberry says joining the co-op was a way of getting her family's "nutritional bang for its buck." She joined the co-op to get healthy foods at reasonable prices.

When she joined the co-op, area groceries didn't have whole grain pasta. It's available locally now, but at a higher cost than Ansberry's 10-pound bag of whole grain noodles from the co-op for $10.

The distributor, North Farm Cooperative of Madison, Wis., offers almost anything. It offers grains, cereals, hot dogs without the fillers, and both turkey and beef hot dogs.

The Ansberrys are a typical co-op family.

Roy Ziegler, the co-op's coordinator, says the co-op's members are mostly mainstream, have growing families and come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Ansberry and her husband, Bill, an accountant for Havco, a local wood products company, are graduates of Notre Dame High School and Southeast Missouri State University.

Ansberry's degree is in marketing; her husband's is in accounting.

Ziegler works for the university as the periodicals librarian at Kent Library. He and his wife have two young children.

About half of the 15 co-op members have college educations. The mix includes blue collar workers, college professors, business people and former missionaries, and they come from all over the area. There are members from Jackson, Cape Girardeau, Benton, McClure, III., Fruitland, Altenburg, Millersville and Patton.

Some members have joined to save money, Ziegler says, and members can save on bulk items such as grains, beans and flour

"There is a considerable savings" on these items, he says.

Members can buy toiletries, vitamins, spices, crackers, flowers, soap, soda, juice, cereal and yogurt.

Most of the items deal with nutrition, Ansberry says. She likes to buy the spinach calzone, a pita pizza with the spinach substituting for the meat.

She says she would pay a lot more outside the co-op for the amount of food her family consumes.

Other people joined the co-op because of the availability of items. North Farm carries specialty items not carried in many grocery stores. Ziegler buys nori, a sea weed he uses in some ethnic recipes, and monnuka raisins, which are as big as the tip of the little finger.

Some members are lactose intolerant, so they order soy-based milk substitute foods. There are soy-based cheeses.

To some, Ziegler says, this might not be a bargain, but it is important for health reasons. Lactose intolerance is not uncommon in children.

Some of the members are "granola people" from the 1960s and 1970s. When co-ops first began, they were social clubs and often were associated with people with an alternative life style. The local co-op is not a social club but a buying club, Ziegler says. Its members are apolitical.

Ziegler was a vegetarian who fell off the wagon. He now eats junk food and hot dogs.

He says he still enjoys vegetarian foods and recipes and also experiments with Chinese, Cajun, Thai and Japanese foods. He likes to try new recipes, and many of the items that go into these foods he buys from the co-op.

The co-op also has organic food~ and vitamin supplements that are competitively priced, Ziegler says. There are also organic meats available. Ziegler prefer~s the ground turkey.

"A lot of people think they are getting a good value" from the co-op, Ziegler says.

Ziegler spends about $75 a month buying from the co-op, and he says he doesn't go to the grocery store nearly as much.

The food co-op must order a minimum of $500 a month for the truck to come to Cape Girardeau. Ziegler, who does the club's ordering, says that's not a problem. Most monthly orders are between $1,500 and $2,000.

Club members get their orders to Ziegler, who uses North Farm's software to order by computer. When the order is ready, a truck is dispatched. Members are notified when the truck will be at the conservation pavilion at Arena Park for distribution.

Ziegler says the computer has made ordering easy, and food cooperatives no longer ship in bulk for members to divvy up. Items are packaged according to the size needed, so there is no divvying up at the distribution point.

Three or four of the co-op's original members remain with the club.

Some people join the co-op for a month and then go onto other things, Ziegler says, adding that it takes some forethought to be in a co-op.

In February, Ansberry bought a 50-pound bag of oats for $20. It will last the family two months, she says.

She also buys her vitamins and nut butters from North Farm. Three, 16-ounce jars of peanut butter cost $6~. These are fresh-ground nut butters without sugar, she says.

A 10-pound bag of whole wheat flour is $2~.50, and she usually buys 10 pounds a month to bake bread. A pound of yeast is $2.29 and can be used over a six-month period.

A 1-pound block of cheese is $2.50 from the co-op and is the quality of the deli cheeses sold at the grocery stores for $5 a pound. North Farm has its own brand of cheese.

Because she is nursing her daughter Elizabeth, she buys herself vitamin supplements from the co-op.

She also looks for bargains in the co-op catalog. The catalog, which comes every other month, usually has about 20 pages of sales.

If jelly is on sale, she buys enough for six months. That might mean some other item might be omitted or cut back so her order stays in the $100-a-month range.

Besides what she budgets for the co-op, Ansberry spends another $250 a month at area grocery stores.

The Ansberrys also buy a third of a cow three times a year from local butcher shop~ or from people they know who are butchering.

Ansberry says she's living the lifestyle she wants. She appreciates being home and home schooling her children.

"There are more important things to u~s than buying the latest thing," she says.