Dave's blog

After a while of not buying anything the value of the items you own start to change. One such item which would normally be worthless to me was a packet of fresh ground Colombian coffee. In the past this would have just sat there until a coffee drinker came round and I’d offer them a cup. Ellie would perhaps have a cup every now and again and I might decide two or three times a year to join her in one, so after around six months it would have probably all gone.
I know that coffee is valuable, it’s a commodity that I can’t grow in this country and as such something worth using as an item for barter.
So with that in mind I asked around all the coffee drinkers I knew, I found a few but most were so hectic I couldn’t actually pin them down (conversationally) to go through with the barter. I tried but the subject kept changing so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to even mention I had some coffee.
A common reply was
‘Yes, yes, I drink coffee, I should really cut down, they say caffeine is bad for you, I don’t have that much, maybe five or six a day, is that too many, you can never tell these days what is good and what is bad for you, perhaps I should cut down, I’ve managed to quit smoking, well I’m down to about 5 or 6 a day, that is almost quitting….’ (I think you get the picture)

As I couldn’t find any who would take me up on the offer of a trade, I decided to log onto ‘justfortheloveofit.org’ and see if I could find someone to barter with. For those who have never heard of it ‘Just for the love of it’ was set up by a forward thinker, one of life’s doers and good friend of mine Mark Boyle. It promotes the idea of a ‘freeconomy’ and rather than babble on in my own words instead I have copied and pasted the website’s philosofree below –

The Freeconomy Community’s aim is to help reconnect people in their local communities through the simple act of sharing. Not only is sharing our resources better for the environment, it saves you money and builds friendships with those people who live closest to you. It is what we call a WIN-WIN-WIN situation.

Everything is shared for FREE on Freeconomy, and no money changes hands between members.
We do not use advertising, we receive no donations or income from the website and it is completely free to join, forever. Why? Just for the love of it!

I should also pay homage to the fact that Mark has been living without money for far longer than myself and being far more hardcore than I could ever be.

I am still paying rent and bills, living in a ordinary terraced house so still using a flush toilet, electric lights etc, etc. I have been trying to use the rocket stove and storm kettle whenever possible to minimize on energy usage but I must admit that I have been using the gas cooker, the microwave and an ordinary kettle. Mark on the other hand digs a hole for his toilet, cooks on a wood burning stove and will cycle everywhere and is in short not spending ANYTHING for a year without compromise.

My experiment into free living is really to see if it can be done at the drop of a hat, with no forward preparation and fitted around a normal (ish) existence. The other reasons for doing it keep changing, I think that’s what happens with a project like this. At first my reasons were simply to make the most of the abundance of free food that is on offer in this country. However soon after I couldn’t help but see what waste is produced and how much of it is still usable. The energy needed to ship tropical fruit half way round the world only to throw it in the bin is simply shocking. It could at the very least be composted! Supermarkets are essentially lazy, greedy entities that would rather throw away perfectly good food to keep profits rolling in rather than have any kind of social conscience. The farmers are forced into selling their produce for less than they can comfortably survive on only for us to buy it in cheap and let it rot in our fridges! Something is clearly wrong. As energy becomes more scarce will we want to pay for food to be shipped to landfill sites by paying an extra premium on our food? Will we want to pay for New Zealand apples during British apple season or due to market forces will we want to pay for imported milk from the continent whilst those across the water import British milk?
The way our modern food system is set up is simply crazy and after this experiment is over and I am buying things again I for one will not be buying from any of the large supermarkets but instead will glean what I can from their bins!

So, what became of the coffee? Well I did find someone to barter with and managed to get some stuffed pasta, some oats and some sugar. One of the hardest things (apart from bread) to get without money is grains, so in the end the coffee was exchanged for something of much greater value to me.

I can’t remember when the decision to stop spending money entirely came about. Since we met Ellie and myself have always been frugal but it does feel like we’re stepping up a gear at the moment. I’ve still not spent anything on food for some time and now we’re trying not to spend anything at all!

It doesn’t seem like we’re missing out either! We kept finding fruit in our infamous bin, so much so that we don’t always take it, as we can’t eat it all! This all changed last week, as we struck gold finding a discarded juicer. At first it seemingly didn’t work but I looked it up on the net to find all it needed was a pulp collector. When connected this pulp collector presses a little button at the back and the juicer springs into action. A little improvisation got it working and we now have a £90 working juicer at our disposal.

So last night we had a glass of fresh apple juice each to wash down our jacket potato (cooked in a found microwave) with rocket (weeded out from my volunteer job at Eastside roots) and skipped onion and fresh tomato.

Going back over the three weeks since we stepped up our freegan activities we’ve had some ups and downs food wise. One of the ups was finding we had a bottle of whey left in the freezer and using it to make a pizza base, two loaves of soda bread and some ricotta cheese (I’m a vegetarian freegan). The pizza used skipped mozzarella with a rocket leaf sauce, foraged mushrooms with homegrown shallots, oregano and a homegrown salad (delicious!). One of the down sides bizarrely started as a real boon. We cycled around Clifton (the posh part of Bristol) trying to find the bins of the posh supermarkets and shops (to no avail!) and instead following a tip off from Andy we foraged bags and bags of fresh plums. Having gouged ourselves on them for a couple of days we soon realised we’d eaten rather more than was good for us. Needless to say finding around 3 kilos of bananas last night might go some way to solving this problem.

A day out in Totnes and Dartington yesterday also nearly left us unstuck. We’ve found that our food is getting stranger and stranger the further back into the store cupboard we go. So after a breakfast of sorghum, quinoa, molasses and plum porridge we packed our bags with the days food and left. I was heading down for an open day for a qualification in Sustainable Horticulture at Dartington Hall and Schumacher College and Ellie had arranged a viewing on a house for us. We did have to buy a train ticket down after trying in vein on lift-share websites. It was a bit of a kick in the teeth to have to spend some money half way into the experiment but we’d sold a second hand book on Amazon which went some of the way to paying for the ticket. The only thing I can say is if there are any drivers out there travelling long distances on their own can you please start using lift-share websites. Who knows you may even make some new friends!
On the train we had some sorghum cakes made with mallow leaf infusion as an egg substitute as a snack and washed it down with a flask of tea made with milk from the buffet trolley.
On arrival to the open day I found a jar of spicy pickled ash keys, given to me from a friend, had exploded in my bag ruining a lot of the food inside. This was somewhat embarrassing but as I tried to minimise the damage to the inside of my bag a prospective student, one of the tutors and myself munched through some of these surprisingly tasty seeds around shards of glass.
Thankfully lunch was provided and I made the most of it, stuffing myself silly, Ellie even cycled up to the Hall to grab a portion. It was a delicious risotto with a salad – all of which looked homegrown. Heading back into Totnes I met up with fellow forager Robin of eatweeds.co.uk. We talked about this non-money venture of mine and after my third glass of water Robin offered me a cup of tea. After much deliberation we decided that this was a gift and as such I should except it and not see it as proxy buying.

So after this long afternoon in a café Ellie and I foraged some of the first real glut of blackberries, ate some wild leaves in a sandwich began to look around Totnes for a freegan dinner. The blackberries and leaves weren’t really staving off the hunger and after looking behind the major supermarkets and around the back of the local shops we decided our best bet was to get back on the train. We devoured the half loaf of bread I had in my bag (slightly vinegar damaged) and got two cups of hot water from the buffet car for a foraged lemon balm tea. The mixture of bread, hot water and soporific herbs made us feel full and sleepy and put off the hunger pangs until we got back home for the before mentioned jacket potato.

So now I’m writing this after a breakfast of two hash browns (made from last nights leftovers) and a mango and banana smoothie (made in a found liquidizer). I’ll soon be putting the finishing touches to our rocket stove, made from free materials, so in conjunction with our haybox oven (also made from free materials) we’ll have free energy to cook with.

Getting on for three weeks ago my girlfriend (Ellie) and myself picked around 12 Kilos of cherries growing on a country lane in the middle of the Cotswolds. These were choice, fat, sweet cherries along with morellos, Japanese yellow and a few other varieties we couldn’t name. We couldn’t believe how much the trees were producing and more importantly how much we could pick and still leave more than enough for the locals and the local wildlife. The trees were heaving and if we had time we could have picked even more!
We were looking after a friends small-holding at the time living off eggs from his hens, watercress we’d picked from a running stream along with bits of food we’d brought with us and things from his garden.
Soon the time came to leave and we loaded up our bikes with crates of cherries, I found room in my bag for a cabbage and a few other choice fruit and vegetables before heading off back to Bristol.

We decided to put a cash figure on what we took home or ate during our stay. All of the food was free range, organically grown or picked from the wild.
Watercress and other wild greens – £12
2 Cabbages – £2
12 Kilos of cherries – £120
12 Eggs (we did get egg bound!) – £4
Broccoli £1.50
Potatoes £2.50
Spinach – £1
Salad Leaves – £2
Broad Beans – £2
Blackcurrants – £4

So all in all we had over £150 worth of food in our bellies and on our bikes. We came home to a similar amount of food off my allotment, gluts of broad beans, rhubarb, gooseberries, raspberries, loads of potatoes, salad leaves, cabbages plus herbs, roots and various other bits and bobs.
On top of this we’d found a fantastic bin for skip diving, or dumpster diving as some know it. This had bananas, a whole watermelon, carrots, some moolis (big white radishes), plums and I’m sure some more things that I can remember.

We’ve been pickling, making jam, freezing things and quite frankly enjoying the abundance of food.

This abundance has prompted us to not spend a single penny on food for as long as we can. I’ve had an added bonus by doing some work for the BBC talking about freeganism and taking home a large bag of shopping they were going to just throw away!

It will be three weeks on Monday (20th July) without spending a penny, I’m even drinking water in cafés and pubs when I go out, lets see how long we can both last!

I apologise for the self-indulgent blog this week but sometimes blogs have to be don’t they?

I like looking back at the old diary I used to keep, it gives me a sense of how much and sometimes how little has changed. In the summer of 2005 I was trying to get a book published, not the Self-Sufficientish Bible, one quite unrelated. I’d also recorded a pop song with my friend Dom which I thought would storm the charts. Here’s an extract from 5th October following that summer -

“I was offered some work today, just crappy call centre stuff but it should be my first regular work since February. Shit, that’s seven months ago! The book was rejected by the publisher last Thursday and Dom’s decided the single won’t get released until January so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just do it for a while. The pay is crap and I may jump ship if something better comes along. It’s for the quit-line for smokers, which is ironic as I am in a constant state of smoking and quitting at the moment.”

Well, that particular book never got published and the pop song was shelved after EMI told us we couldn’t release it as it infringed on the copyright of one of their songs. It was a bit irritating as the tune was essentially Pachelbel’s Canon but they refused us permission, as it was too similar to ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Quite how you can claim copyright on a song from the 1680s is beyond me!

I’ve giving up smoking AGAIN, it’s been three or four weeks now, it feels like I might do it this time but I always say that. I’m not working in a call centre (thankfully); I did that job for about 3 or 4 weeks and then worked at the Soil Association for about three months. I then temped for a further year before getting the book contract at the close of 2006.

It is now 2009 and the last trickle of the advance for the book has just about to run out – the bonus about living like I do is I can stretch money quite far! At this time of year my food bill is almost nothing, the only energy I use is for hot water (washing myself and clothes), cooking, my laptop and the radio so bills are low.

People assume that if you have a website and a book then somehow you must be doing really well financially. Well the truth is I can work quite hard, writing, maintaining an allotment and garden, organising wild food walks, studying wild food and gardening (amongst other things) doing volunteer work, preserving and cooking food and skip diving. I seem to put the hours in but I get little financial reward for it.

What I do get is really, really great food that hasn’t been flown half way across the planet. I get the sense that I’m actually living rather than just counting the hours until I can leave work. I’m healthy, I’m happy and what’s more if someone asks what I’ve been up to then I’ve usually got a story to tell rather than just saying ‘you know, same old, same old’. Most days I can also have an afternoon nap, it’s one of the greatest pleasures in life, who needs caffeine when you can just snooze for 20 minutes!

What I don’t have is a flat-screen TV, a new computer (my laptop is on it’s last legs but still holding up), I don’t have a car instead I cycle around on my £30 bike.My mobile phone is rubbish but it still works (don’t go for the 3 skype phone –it’s crap), my clothes are okay but I’m certainly not in any fashion trend. I don’t eat meat, I don’t fill my house with brand new furniture, and I don’t pay a mortgage. If anyone was to look at my bank account on the surface I’m not very successful.However is success really earning £20K, £30K or £100K a year but never having time to enjoy it?

-Dave