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Sep 15
My summer of not spending had to come to an end, I’ve not updated this blog for a while and I’ve been spending again for a little while, spending a lot less than I used to but spending none the less .
The whole thing lasted six weeks and I decided to have it as a series of tests to work out if it is possible to live a cashless lifestyle whilst going about my daily business.
With any lifestyle change scenarios are often imagined where it would be impossible to live that lifestyle. For example as a vegetarian I am often asked ridiculous questions like, ‘if you were on a desert island with a cow would you eat the cow?’. Hmm, what possible chain of events would bring me to the circumstance of being on a dessert island with a cow? Perhaps if I was cabin crew on a dairy ship floating through the Caribbean? How likely is this to happen for a professional writer/forager living in the UK?? Besides surely the desert island would have some edible food and if not I would probably feed the cow seaweed and live of it’s milk, this would sustain me for far longer than it would just killing the cow and eating it! Thankfully I don’t get asked twatty questions like those too much any more.
I’m extremely lucky to work the way I do and this summer proved perhaps the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I was booked to work at the Eden Project taking people on wild food walks as part of their summer programme which focused on survival. The theme seemed pretty apt as I took a gamble and didn’t quite bring enough food for the whole weekend and instead decided to find a lot of my food either from skips or foraged from the wilds of Cornwall.
We were booked into a farm house/hostel owned by the project and inside the Eden site itself. As luck would have it right by the farms entrance wild currants were growing alongside wild strawberries and blackberries. I found some sugar inside and made a single pot of microwave jam. I’d never tried this before but it is incredibly simple, I put the fruit in a small bowl and microwaved it for a minute, then added the sugar, stirred and put on for a minute longer. That was it, near instant jam!I’d been doing some voluntary work for the botanic gardens in Bristol before going to Eden and developed a taste for the sugar cane I was weeding out. It was a bonus to forage not only UK grown sugar cane but banana leaves to cook tamales with all sourced free from with the Bristol city limits.
At Eden my taste for the exotic continued, I again munched on sugar cane but this time from the rather international looking compost heap. During my stay there I feasted on UK grown tangerines and bananas left for the staff to eat. I befriended one of the gardeners in the Mediterranean biome who also had a passion for foraging and as a result took home fresh tomatoes, fresh cabbage, and beetroot. The canteen would allow staff to take home sandwiches and fruit at the end of each day rather than binning it so I ended up taking stuff back home with me. It really did live up to it’s name and rather than being forced into spending it was a garden of Eden for anyone working there. After the weeks preceding it felt almost like I was living in the mythical land of Cockayne where food is abundant at every turn.
Andy and I took full advantage of this land of Cockayne and dug up some Burdock root to roast. This was going to make part of a roast dinner to cement a friendship with a couple of bushcraft experts also taking part in the survival summer and camping in the field next to the house. We had a full three course meal, some foraged, some bin dived , some brought from my allotment and a very minor part bought, by the bushcraft experts, from a local shop. We could barely move by the end of it and went to bed extremely satiated.
I found some of the properties of burdock out to my cost that night. It is high in a carbohydrate called inulin which acts as a pro-biotic. Now pro-biotics encourage the growth of bacteria and bacteria in the gut produce gas. Gas in the gut means, well I don’t think I need to go on. I woke up in the middle of the night with cramps and explosive farts and from the next room could hear that Andy was going through exactly the same thing! We put it down to under cooking the root and perhaps eating too much of it as neither of us had such drastic reactions to it in the past. It made for an interesting day the next day as we both had to find quiet places to release our burdock induced gas!
On the way home I again stopped in Totnes to look at a couple of properties and had a couple of hours to kill. I was a day away from the date Ellie and I had fixed to stop our cashless experiment.
It was Ellie’s birthday coming up and I had emailed an ethical clothing company called Enamore cheekily asking if they would provide a present in return for a mention in my book. Now the book had been on sale for over a year at this point and they had no reason to help me. Thankfully they did and provided me with a mystery package to present to Ellie on her birthday. (I should say at this point Enamore did say I was incredibly cheeky and they don’t normally do anything like that!). Whilst walking round Totnes I found a book I’d never seen before on horizontal bee-keeping. It talked about a method of bee-keeping not only more in tune with how a bee natural behaves but also a method that didn’t need tonnes of expensive bee-keeping equipment. I walked around the shop with book in hand not knowing what to do. The buying of this book would help out a small independent bookshop and as it was published by a small independent publisher the writer might even see some of the money from the sale. It didn’t take me long to weigh it up and I broke the not spending bubble.The strangely limp and dull looking note left my canvas wallet after spending a summer sitting in there in all weather. I looked at this crumpled note as if it was foreign currency. It was unfamiliar, like money can be when you’ve been away travelling for months on end. I felt like I should mentally convert pounds back into the countries currency I had been living in for the last six weeks. Only that country was this one but the currency was favours, bartering and good will
It felt odd to part with the money and I felt like shouting out to the woman in the bookshop what the buying of this book meant. ‘Do you realise how long it is since I’ve spent money!, do you realise what this system is doing for the planet and what a meaningful life you can have if you let go of material wealth even for a short time!?’ I didn’t say this of course I just said, ‘thanks very much’ and ‘no, I don’t need a bag’
3 Responses to “In the garden of Eden, baby!”
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Eccentric Emma said on September 15th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
What is the name of the horizontal bee keeping book?
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dave said on October 2nd, 2009 at 8:03 am
The barefoot beekeeper.
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dave said on October 6th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Hello Edward, you should have had my email by now. Hyde park does have some species of goose-foot (Chenopodium) by the serpentine and there are many trees with edible uses such as, Lime, Cherry and Beech. My email goes into more detail but drop me a line with some plants you have identified and I may be able to help.
