Dave's blog

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’

It’s been a while now we’ve both been living for free so things we had in the first month are beginning to run out. The festival last weekend did supply us with a lot of essentials we would have normally had to buy namely toothpaste, sun-cream (not that we need to much of that!), shampoo and conditioner all left by people leaving early.
We are running low on laundry liquid and so are trying to stretch our clothes out a little longer that I normally would. I’ve been much more rigid than normal with what are outdoor scruff clothes and which are for best. It’s amazing how quickly new clothes can become ruined and become ‘allotment ware’. Even despite doing this the laundry basket is filling up and we’ll have to use the last of the liquid soon.

I’m not sure if it will work with laundry liquid but up to now I’ve been employing a two week rule. Back in March we needed a new toaster as ours gave up the ghost and fixing it was beyond my skills. I thought to myself that I wouldn’t buy a new but instead would wait until one turned up. Within two weeks I found a discarded working toaster where my friend was working as a security guard at an abandoned print works.
Time and time again I tried this method since, we wanted a juicer so waited two weeks and one turned up in the street. The same with work boots, a griddle pan, a electric whisk, a bread machine, a pair of wellies and both of us got new clothes in a clothes swap last week. I honestly think that if you live in a city or large town and you want anything then try waiting two weeks and one will turn up, I’ve even got a bed that way in the past.

For the avid festival goer in the UK there are at least three large festivals to choose from every weekend from June to the end of August. The weekend just gone (24th – 26th July) there was the Womad festival, Camp Bestival, Truck Festival and Secret Garden Party, all now established and all over 10, 000 people! They are huge money spinners for the organisers and retailers alike as the average spend on a festival weekend is now

Yes that’s right SIX HUNDRED POUNDS! £600 is more than I live off in month, even before this experiment! If £600 is the average, this means some people spend more! Unless I became a cocaine addict with a passion for hiring sports cars I don’t think I could every spend that much in a single weekend. So if £600 is the average could it be possible to do an entire festival for nothing?
I has a head start on most as early this year I emailed loads of festivals to try and do some workshops. A few got back to me but then working at the Eden project meant I had to cancel some of them. One I could do as it was in July rather than August was Camp Bestival down in Lulworth Cove. It’s a fantastic part of the country and somewhere I would go on holiday even without a festival taking place, so getting a free pair of tickets to do a wild food walk was a real bonus.

After putting messages all over the internet on car-share schemes and even this very site weeks in advance it got closer to the date and no-one was coming forward to drive us. In despair I emailed the woman who booked me in the first place to see if she had any ideas. She put me in touch with someone who was driving down on the Friday (who quite by chance lived around two minutes walk from my house).

Our companions for the trip down to Dorset were due to join their wives and children who had set up on the festival site a few days before to run a stall. They were really friendly and the journey down flew by just chatting about what we all respectively did for a living and generally getting to know each other. They were TV music producers and by the sounds of things quite busy and skilled at their trade. We didn’t mention our no-money experiment and as we’d already agreed to pay for travel if essential – Our plan was to offer petrol money, or if they asked we would give them it. On arrival we had the usual great British politeness stand off – ‘are you sure you don’t want any petrol money?’ ‘go on please take it’ etc, etc. In the end we agreed to give them £10 for parking.

As we set foot into the festival we’d spent £5 each rather than the £410 the average person had already spent at this point. Some might see this as a defeat but our no-money rules meant we only spent money transport (when unable to travel by bike), bills, rent and tax – Dorset is a 2-3 day cycle and Ellie couldn’t get that time off work. To me this experiment is more to do with self-reliance than blagging off someone else; so paying someone kind enough to drive us on a 6 hour round trip just ten pounds didn’t seem like a defeat to us!

The first night was easy, we had a gas hob, food to cook on it (pasta from the coffee barter) and some booze we had in the back of the cupboard. It’s amazing really just what you can find lying around your home that is perfectly edible or drinkable. I think alcohol is one of those things that most will have a bottle or two of something lying around. Booze is often left for years and years before a brave (or alcoholic) friend turns up and drinks it all. A friend of mine told me a story of his near alcoholic mate turning up at his parents house and drinking a bottle of whiskey with a label reading ‘by appointment to his majesty the King’. So later that night we watched Mercury Rev and for the first time in what seemed like months, both of us were feeling a little tipsy.

Our easy ride of Friday began to wain a little as whilst boiling water for tea the gas burner ran out of gas! I was feeling a little fuzzy from the night before at this point and just wanted a caffeine hit to get me started. The water was half way to boiling when it died so we did at least have luke warm tea and instead of porridge we ate the last of the croissants we’d gleaned the week before from a Tesco bin.

I did have my storm kettle as a back up for the gas burner but unsure of the fire regulations and as security seemed to be quite tight (we got told off quite a lot on Friday night for various very minor misdemeanor’s – like being in the wrong field at the wrong time!) we decided it best to leave the festival site to cook our lunch and dinner.

Camp Bestival is a festival by the sea, so for those inclined, a good day’s foraging could be had. On the Friday we had already foraged nettle tops, jelly ear fungus and a few other bits and bobs from the festival perimeter but on the Saturday we decided to take a walk down to the cove and see what diverse goodies Lulworth had to offer.
We were not disappointed, on the two mile walk to the beach we found the last of the wild cherries, cherry plums, horse mushrooms, sorrel and some fat hen! The cove itself was full of coastal favourites like sea beet and rock samphire.

We made a delicious one pot pasta meal on the base of the storm kettle and sat eating our bartered and foraged feast looking out to sea as the sun was setting (whilst removing stinging ants from various parts of our body).

We arrived back at the festival for P J Harvey and some obscure Mexican aniseed, honey booze I pulled from the back of the cupboard at home. Perhaps it was the lack of anything else to drink rather than being as bad as I remembered (hence being left in the cupboard for months) it was actually really nice. It was also incredibly strong – a little like a Mexican ouzo.

By the Sunday we thought ‘sod it’ to security and decided to cook on the storm kettle inside the perimeter. We were in Crew camping which meant security were in the same field as us and every security guard at the festival had to walk past our tent. Whilst boiling up our morning cuppa using scraps of wood and discarded cardboard I started to rouse a little attention. Rather than tell me off security were fascinated by the workings of the storm kettle. One even jotted down the name of the company that made them and swore he would buy one for the next festival he was working at.
It also attracted the attention of a festival geek, he spotted it from across the field and ran over in an affected ‘kooky’ manner.
‘wow, what’s that, is it a milk churn, is it a …..’
I cut him off mid flow, ‘It’s a storm kettle, it boils water quickly with very little fuel’
‘oh, well, yeah, I just thought it looked weird, I know you’ve told me what it is but it looks weird, I mean is it a puzzle, a jug within a jug’
‘Are you a dickhead within a wanker’ I felt like replying but bit my tongue and grinned.

I’m not surprised it got so much attention as they are a very useful bits of kit, the kettle itself sits on what is essentially a portable container for a fire. It also needs very little fuel to burn and will boil 1.5 litres of water in very little time.

Sunday lunch was a high point, we cooked up a noodle soup using the rock samphire, a small piece of block coconut cream, curry powder, some jelly ear, sorrel, beet spinach, nettles and a little bit of a half bottle of wine we found discarded as someone had left the festival. It was absolutely delicious and set me up for the wild food walk I was set to do that afternoon.

By evening we were feeling a little smug as heavy rain was forecast the next day and we’d done it, we’d gone through a whole festival without spending a penny! We had timed it well also as we had just a Tupperware box of turnip curry left to have that evening. As we packed up the tent we gave the curry a little sniff to see what we had in store for later and both of us nearly retched. Nearly three days in the Dorset sun had not done good things to this humble turnip meal and against all of our principals we were forced to throw away this fermenting box of veggies.

We arrived at the camp-site of the bloke who drove us and instantly sensed something was afoot. We weren’t mistaken and for reasons I won’t go into here our lift was now to leave in the morning rather than in five minutes! SHIT, SHIT, SHITTY, SHIT! I thought to myself, we have nothing to eat! The rain started to pour and we sat down to gather our thoughts assuring our hosts that leaving tomorrow was no problem at all.
We were hungover, sleep deprived, tired, hungry and now a little demoralised and both decided this was time to call an end to the experiment, we had to eat!
Wandering over to the field with all the catering vans we soon realised we had no idea what food was on offer. I had seen Hugh Fernly Whitingstall the night before and recalled that he had a River Cottage stand at the festival. I couldn’t help but feel a little awkward as he passed me in a crowd, he stared at me right in the eye as if he recognised me from somewhere. I felt like talking to him but I couldn’t help but think about my Chef within a Chef blog where I suggest that you stuff Anthony Worrel Thompson straight up Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s arse! How can I say, ‘yeah, I’m quite a fan of your work, did you read that blog about shoving a short fat man up your anal passage?’. That aside River Cottage would at least be local, seasonal, organic and free range so if we were going to spend money it would at least support local farmers and not line the pockets of large oil companies or multi-nationals.
I’m not sure what I expected, It was all bloody meat, not a single veggie meal to be had or at least none that seemed worthy of breaking our not spending regime. We moved on and queued for our joint favourite – flat Italian pizza. We’d seen people eating it all weekend and now we wanted to sample it for ourselves. It seemed half the festival had the same idea and the queue didn’t budge for around half and hour. This gave us enough time to come to our senses, we could forage and cook a meal in the time it would take to get served. We headed back to get the storm kettle and on the way found a loaf of bread and some margarine left by someone vacating the festival. The festival fatigue was really getting us by this point and we thought well we’ll eat some bread then go look for some more food.
Whilst eating the bread and butter an odd thing happened, although very plain it became one of the nicest things I’d ever eaten! After a number of slices with a little foraged sorrel and rock samphire I had in my pocket from the night before we both felt strangely satisfied.
To avoid the rain that was now chucking it down we had an early night followed by a breakfast of bread and butter. The long sleepy ride home was punctuated by finding red currents in a lay-by and the rest of Monday was spent recovering gently by eating, sleeping and generally making the most of not being under canvas.

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.