Authors: Mark Boyle
Figure 1
‘My stove!’
To heat the trailer, I decided a wood burning stove was the only option. I could burn waste wood, which is very environmentally friendly. Rotting wood produces methane, a greenhouse gas more than twenty times as effective at heating the Earth’s atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Strange as it may sound, it’s better to burn wood than let it rot. That is not to say you should clean up a forest floor; urban wastelands are much better foraging grounds, as the wood there does not form part of a natural ecology. I also knew I could coppice woodland on the farm, which is a part of good land management.
After weeks of research and enquiries, I got a tip-off that a guy in a local squat made wood burning stoves from recycled gas bottles, bike parts, and scrap metal. Squats often get a bad press and people believe those who live in them are freeloaders who contribute nothing to society. The reality is often opposite: those who live in these previously unoccupied buildings usually give as freely as they receive. And my wood burning stove proves the point: Gavin, the squatter, whom I’ve come to know, knocked me up a beautiful one from waste materials for £60 ($90). When you consider it took him over a day to make it, this was an absolute bargain.
Ideally, I wouldn’t have needed electricity at all; laptops and cell phones aren’t exactly necessary for survival, but a major part of my year was about communicating my experiences with anyone who was interested. You can’t make electricity from nettles and rosehips, so some element of environmental damage was inevitable. I had a number of options – wind power, solar power, or wind-up generation. I just had to choose the option that would minimize the damage. During the British winter, wind power is the best choice, while solar power is the best in the summer. Wind-up is very laborious at any time of year, though it has the benefit of not being reliant on the weather. Ideally you would have all of them; diversity is the key to covering all
eventualities. Having weighed up all the options, wind power was my first choice, but I really couldn’t afford anything that suited my needs. So I decided to go with solar power. Trying to find a second-hand solar panel is like trying to find a sober Irishman on the seventeenth of March, so I went against everything I believe in and bought a new one, in a half-price sale, for £200 ($300). There is a lot of embodied energy involved in solar power production; the minerals and materials used to make the panels have to be mined, processed and shipped around the world, so I wasn’t overly happy.
Because I was quite a distance from the nearest streetlight – or indeed any night time light other than the moon – a flashlight was essential. To my delight, I found a wind-up flashlight – a present from a journalist – lying forgotten in my old backpack.
To wash myself, there was no option that really excited me. The easiest thing was to buy a solar shower. When I say easy, I mean it was easy to buy, because it certainly wasn’t easy to stand under it at seven o’clock on a frosty winter morning. I picked one up for £5 ($7.50), again new, which seems cheap until you realize it really isn’t anything more than a thick black plastic bag with a bit of hose at the bottom. However, they are quite effective in the summer. You leave them out in the sun during the day and because they are black they absorb the sun’s heat. On a warm English summer’s day, they can bring the water inside up to well over 20°C. After buying it I got a bit of ‘the guilt’ – I really should have made one. And if time allowed, I decided, I would make myself a hot tub if I could get my hands on an old bath via Freecycle. My water came from various sources. For washing I used river water, but for drinking I mostly took tap water from the farm, as tests by a local scientist had shown the river to be contaminated with various pollutants. And every now and then, after prolonged rain or snow, a spring rose at the bottom of the valley, which I used whenever I could.
Getting my new home and kitting it out for off-grid living had cost me a total of £265 ($400), flying in the face of those who say that environmentalism is only for the wealthy middle classes with nothing better to do. I fully accept that I was very lucky and it did take me quite a bit of work to do it so cheaply. But even if you stick on another thousand pounds, it would still be within the reaches of most in western society, given how much we all spend on furniture alone. Now that the homestead was as good as ready, my next priority was to figure out how I was going to feed myself.
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.
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.
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.