by Boyle, Mark
FOOD
In the West, our general appreciation of anything related to food – growing, foraging and perhaps even cooking – has decreased significantly since the Second World War. The last generation of people who had to grow food to survive are elderly. And although there has been a welcome recent interest in growing our own food, many people today have little idea where their food comes from, beyond the supermarket. A good friend of mine who takes kids on educational walks around organic farms in Bristol once asked a group of ten-year-olds, ‘does anyone know what this is?’ while pointing at some rosemary in an herb garden. After twenty seconds one hand went up and proclaimed that it was corned beef. He wasn’t joking; worse still, nobody laughed. Given this, it should come as no surprise when I tell you that one of the first things people ask me when they hear I am free of money is ‘what on earth do you eat?’ A lot of people today think that food just comes from the supermarket.
The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. To start with, Mother Earth doesn’t charge a penny for her fruits. Money is our invention, not hers, though to listen to many people you’d think it had the same status as water, food and oxygen. There is food for free everywhere. You just need to know where to look and what to look for.
There are four legs to the money-free food table. The most exciting is foraging, which originally meant wandering in search of food and provisions, though it is mostly used these days to describe the act of picking and eating wild foods. I am not much of a forager. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but it takes a lifetime to learn and I am a relative novice, although my knowledge is much greater than it was. Necessity is a great educator and I am also lucky enough to have a number of foraging friends who have helped me to learn. One, Fergus Drennan, who sprang to fame as the BBC’s ‘Roadkill Chef’, is one of the world’s foremost foragers. And two of my old allotment neighbors are Andy and Dave Hamilton, self-sufficiency gurus and co-authors of The Self-Sufficientish Bible.
Foraging in modern society can never be about getting all your food from the wild but it can be a great supplement. In my ideal world, we would all forage for the majority of our food. However, given that there isn’t a lot of wild left and that the population of the UK is now more than 61 million, there isn’t enough for everyone. The food you do get from foraging is highly nutritious; it’s also vibrant and alive and so much fun to find and pick. What’s more, the whole experience is absolutely free and anyone can do it, though I would always recommend not eating anything unless you are sure it is safe. Complete novices should start with simple things like apples, blackberries and nettles and work up their knowledge as they go along.
The second leg of the food-for-free table is what I call ‘urban foraging’; using other people’s waste. The news media like to portray this as jumping into somebody’s trash can for a bit of dumpster-diving or dumpster-raiding, though the reality is very different. Dumpster-diving definitely does have its place, though it is getting increasingly difficult. The problem with it – which is also the great thing about it – is that you never know what you’re going to get until you go. You can quite easily come away with a lot of your week’s supply but, nutritionally, I wouldn’t recommend eating only waste food. You very rarely get good organic, fresh produce, and any diet lacking in that is unhealthy in my eyes, given the amount of oil-based pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers sprayed on conventionally farmed fruit and vegetables. But dumpster diving is perfect for products you cannot grow or forage for without a lot of processing and the right tools. I prefer to build relationships with those businesses that throw perfectly good food away because they want to have the reputation of only selling the freshest items. They often have to pay for disposal of this food and I find that if you approach them in the right manner, they are more than happy to give you their waste. When it comes down to it, very few people want to throw out good food, especially considering that almost half of the world’s population suffers from not having enough.
The remaining two legs of the table are the two ways of acquiring fresh, local, organic produce and grain without money. The obvious one is to grow the food yourself. It’s extremely difficult to make a profit from growing food organically, on a small scale, as supermarkets have completely altered what the public perceives to be a normal price. The few farmers that do are certainly not in it for the money, as there are much easier ways to make a living; most do it because they are passionate about growing chemical-free food in a way that respects the long-term health of the soil. However, there is nothing to stop you growing food yourself. It seems insane to me that a small-scale farmer should spend long hours growing food, then sell it at minuscule wholesale prices and use the profits to buy their own food at much more expensive retail prices.
It is really difficult to meet all your own food needs by yourself, unless you are part of a community that grows and eats its food communally. This is where the last leg comes in – bartering. Bartering can either be an exchange of food, especially in the summer when many people have gluts, or an exchange of skills for food or skills you don’t have. I like to do it informally; work hard for somebody during the day and at the end of it receive a non-negotiated amount of food.
Some people say this sounds very risky but I’ve yet to come away feeling scammed. Sometimes I tell people that I worked all day for a fifty-five-pound bag of oats. They usually think I am crazy; you can buy the same bag for $30 and I’ve done nine hours’ hard labor. But these people are thinking conventionally. I think we need to be more aware of the real cost of food. Those fifty-five pounds of oats should never cost $30. If I had to plant, weed, water, harvest and roll that much oats, it would take me about sixty hours. Therefore, I get sixty hours of work for only nine, which I think is a great deal, as does the person I help. That’s the beauty of it. These relationships form much tighter friendships between people and I believe can play a crucial role in our efforts to rebuild communities around trust; relationships in which friendships, not cash, are seen as security.
I spent four months building relationships, either with the land on which I live or with the people of my local community. I learned where the best dumpsters were, which businesses had waste food, where I could find wild foods, who I could help, and some of the skills I would need to grow my own food. Strength lies in diversity and the more sources of food you have, the more chance you have of surviving when one lets you down.
Nevertheless, as some of the people with whom I built relationships were eighteen miles away in the city, my next challenge was to set myself up with a means of transportation.
TRANSPORTATION
There are two main forms of free transportation, although they often have hidden costs. Walking is completely free if you are prepared to walk barefoot or to make your own shoes. Otherwise, just like the pen, it is extremely cheap but not totally free. I learned how to make flip-flops out of old car tires, spare fabric and used bicycle inner tubes: I cut the shape of my foot out of the tire, clad it in some comfortable material, preferably hemp, and used the inner tube as the bit I put my toes around. Walking is my preferred mode of transportation. These days even cycling seems too fast. When you are walking you can hear the birds sing, you can check out the plants around you, and it’s a great way of relaxing and exercising. But walking takes time and, given the time restraints inherent in money-free living, I decided that unless I was really ahead of myself, I would always use my bike.
The second possible form of free transportation is the bicycle. Obviously, bikes are made from parts and if one breaks you need to replace the part or fix it. That’s not to say you can’t do it without money; you just need to build a relationship with someone who has access to bike parts, which may involve bartering. I get my bike parts from a couple of local stores that have to throw out whole bikes because one major thing is wrong, even though most of the bike is perfectly fine. Because they can’t sell a used part, such as a brake pad, they would otherwise have to send the whole thing to
landfill.
As part of my year involved me using other people’s waste, I had to find a way of carrying items on my bicycle. I had budgeted only £160 ($240) for everything transportation-related, which didn’t leave a lot for a trailer. The cheapest one I could find, which was small and not very sturdy, was £80 ($120). I went to a few second-hand bike stores, where I found one of those carriages that parents normally carry their kids in. It was only £70 ($105) and was quite a bit bigger than the trailer. Knowing that my chances of getting one from Freecycle were very slim, I bit the bullet and bought it. I also got a good pair of waterproof saddlebags for £50 ($75). For lights, dynamos don’t require batteries; a friend who is petrified of cycling nowadays gave me one.
COMMUNICATIONS
While it is great being able to communicate with people, especially when what you are doing may be a resource for others, it’s not exactly necessary for survival. Even if I had been cut off from all or most forms of communication, it wouldn’t have meant I couldn’t live without money; I just wouldn’t be able to share the experience as effectively.
Two things that have completely changed the way we live since the 1990s are cell phone technology and the Internet. I have a love/hate relationship with the phone; when socializing, I prefer to just go and see people. But I knew that if I wanted to communicate to the world about my year without money I was probably going to need a phone, at least for the first few weeks. How to run a cell phone without money was an issue. I had a ‘pay as you go’ phone – with no contract and no bills – but I thought I might get cut off if I didn’t put credit on it every three months. Friends thought I should put lots of credit on beforehand but this wouldn’t have been living without money and would certainly have violated my ‘normality’ rule. So, I put no credit on and hoped for the best. This meant I could only receive calls but it was better than nothing.
The farm has a landline phone and they were more than happy to let me receive calls for interviews (radio stations don’t like interviewees to use a cell phone because of the poor sound quality). They were also happy for me to make some calls, as I was working so much, but I didn’t feel that spending their money should form part of the experiment. The farm also had some WiFi flying around, which residents at the farm were already using. This meant that I could easily keep up with my commitments to the Freeconomy Community.
EVERYTHING ELSE
My main goal in the run-up to the start of my year was to ensure that I had thought about and prepared methods of providing shelter, food, heating, energy, transportation, and communication. There were many other areas of everyday living I could have thought about and several things I couldn’t possibly predict I might need. However, I decided that I was just going to have to deal with everything else as it arose. There really is only so much preparation you can do and I decided to put faith in the old maxim that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
With that, I put away my list, relaxed my shoulders and resolved to curtail my use of money as much as possible immediately, as a trial for the year itself. I thought it would be wise to get in a bit of practice before I started what was going to turn out to be a very public experiment.
4
BUY NOTHING EVE
THE WEEK BEFORE
When you are preparing for a momentous change in your life, the reality often doesn’t kick in until a few weeks beforehand. Then you start thinking about how it is really going to affect your life, wonder why the hell you decided to put yourself in such a position, and occasionally, inevitably, ask yourself whether you can get out of it.
It was only during moments of complete exhaustion that I felt like that. I decided to launch my moneyless year by putting on a ‘Food for Free Freeconomy Feast’ in Bristol. I aimed to make a free, three-course, full-service meal solely from waste and foraged food, for as many people as I could. The problem was I was already quite stressed about everything else I had to do in the run-up to the start date. And here I was taking on a mammoth mission right at the beginning; making what was already going to be a demanding day even more difficult. I also decided that it would be a good idea to start living the no-money life a week early, giving myself the luxury of a trial run, with the idea that before Buy Nothing Eve, I could acquire any infrastructural requirements I had overlooked.
It turned out that this wasn’t even close to being a good idea. I had so much to do in the city that week that living the slow life in the country was impossible. I abandoned my trial run after just two days and hoped that I hadn’t overlooked anything too critical. I decided to stay with Claire in the city for the rest of the week, giving me a chance to spend some time with her in normal circumstances, which I felt was particularly important as we had only been seeing each other for a few weeks. Spending a few days in the city was a good idea; it bought me some time, took some of the pressure off and gave me a chance to catch up with myself. I had an instinct that the enormity of the year ahead would soon make more such chances almost impossible. This was when I really started to feel the pressure, with moments when I definitely thought about packing it all in and having a normal life, in which I got to spend time with friends, go for drinks and vacations, and maybe even have some time off every now and then.
Preparations for the free feast were going reasonably well. I’d scored 200 pounds of vegetables, about to be composted, from a local organic produce wholesaler. The problem was we had no idea how many people would show up and, given that we were organizing a free meal, cooked by chefs like Fergus, there was a chance it was going to be very popular. We needed much more produce.
By the evening of Thursday November 27, I was mentally exhausted. I wanted the year to start and to get back to living again. I decided to take the next day off, catch up on some reading and tie up a few loose ends. Oh, and go for that last beer.
CASHLESS COMMUNICATION
Before my moneyless year, I faced a difficult decision; whether or not to use two of the products – which most people would classify as luxurious – of financially-fuelled industrialization: a cell phone and a laptop computer.
It was a dilemma. If I decided not to use the tools that would enable me to communicate my experiment to the world, I risked being criticized for running away, looking out for myself and not contributing to society in any way. I also knew that if I did use them then I’d also be criticized, as I would be speaking out about money and industrialization using two pieces of technology that were reliant on both, which could be perceived as being very hypocritical. I decided to use them. If using them meant that I could let even one person know about moneyless living, that alone would be worth the accusations of hypocrisy.
Communicating without cash is obviously never going to be as convenient as with it, but it is still certainly possible. Communicating with those who live nearby has always been free; it just involves getting together. I’ve found it really beneficial to have been forced back into this situation. However, as cheap travel has enabled us to have family and friends dispersed across the world, we have a huge need for technological communication.
For email, there are quite a few options. You can usually get it for free at your local library, which doubles up as a great way of sharing a computer. If you have your own computer and Internet access, you can use Skype (www.skype.com) to make completely free computer-to-computer ‘phone’ calls with anyone else in the world who also has Skype. Many websites (such as www.cbfsms.com) allow you to send free text messages, but be careful which you choose; some of them cost the person who receives the text message, which is hardly the point.
However, for all these, you need a computer. If you know how to put one together, you can easily get all the parts from Freecycle. Once you have the hardware set up, you can use Linux, a piece of free and open source software, as your operating system and OpenOffice for your spreadsheet, presentation, and word processing needs. OpenOffice is compatible with all Microsoft Office applications. Linux also has the added benefit of being really secure, so y
ou don’t need to fork out on expensive security and anti-virus software.
Failing that, get two cups, a very long piece of string and ...
BUY NOTHING EVE, NOVEMBER 28, 2008
Having given myself the day off, I was finally starting to feel more relaxed and looking forward to the day ahead. My schedule was supposed to look something like this:
7:00am Wake up, have some breakfast and read for a bit.
9:00am Meet Fergus, drive in his van to the wholesale food market to see if we could get some waste vegetables for the feast.
11:00am Go into town, print flyers for the feast and pick up any infrastructural stuff I felt I still needed.
1:00pm Lunch.
2:00pm Back to bed for an afternoon nap and some reading.
5:30pm Dinner.
7:00pm Meet my friends Chris and Suzie for a few farewell drinks before they took off on an around-the-world trip over land and sea.
10:00pm Bed.
10:01pm Read.
10:02pm Sleep.
Life regularly indulges its annoying habit of not letting things go to plan. Instead of relaxing before the most bizarre day of my thirty years on this planet, my day turned out something like this: