The Moneyless Man (22 page)

I called a volunteers’ meeting one evening, just three weeks before international Buy Nothing Day 2009. First, we needed to decide if it was possible to pull off such a mission in such a short time. Second, we had to decide what we were going to do, how we were going to do it and who was going to do what. After an extraordinarily efficient four-hour meeting, everyone had agreed that it was going ahead, that it was going to be big and that everyone had to be responsible for making a bit happen. This was Freeconomy in action.

There were just two tiny hurdles. The first was promotion: this was needed straight away but couldn’t happen until we’d overcome the second hurdle: finding the venue. This event was going to be big. We needed to find a large place, in a central location, where we could have the space for free. No small task.

Francene, responsible for talking me into what became an intense and highly-pressured 180 hours of work at exactly the same time the world’s media once more picked up on my story, got her rear end into action in late, but typically fine, form. She got in touch with Oli Wells, director of an up-and-coming venue in Stokes Croft, an area of Bristol that, in the last three years, had been transformed from a place rife with homelessness and drug abuse into the artistic quarter of the city. She explained what we wanted to do and why. Oli was incredibly enthusiastic and offered us the entire second floor of his highly sought-after venue for free. He said if we could make a DVD of the whole event and
its run-up he’d appreciate it but, in pure Freeconomic style, he didn’t make it a condition.

There was one slight problem with the venue; it didn’t have a kitchen. Actually, it didn’t even have running water. We had the perfect space but we had to find stoves, gas, silverware, tables, chairs, boilers, utensils, plates, glasses, and everything else that a restaurant needs. We’d have to borrow everything, get it to the venue for one day and then get it all back – in one piece – to the right people the next day. I tried not to let it overwhelm me, but this really was a monumental moneyless mission.

I made a list, together with our head chef, Andy Drummond. I sent a few emails and spoke to a few people. Within a week we had been promised, by seven organizations, enough kitchen gear to feed and seat about a thousand mouths for an evening. (One of the organizations was the charity I’d made a cash flow forecast for earlier in the year.) Volunteers who’d been assigned the task of finding the gas we’d need to power the stoves came up with some seventy pounds of butane otherwise destined to sit in sheds, never to be used.

We needed to get all the stuff there in time. A team of drivers and cyclists got together to make that happen. Next on the list was food; only second in priority because if we’d had neither venue nor kitchen, we wouldn’t have needed it. We set up three wild food foraging teams, one led by Fergus, another by Andy and the last by James, who also volunteered to teach his crew how to gather and press apples for juice for the day.

Three dumpster diving teams, led by Cai and Abby, our most experienced divers, were set up. Cai could climb fifteen-foot-high walls and slide down lampposts in a way that made me believe he’d done a stint either as a fireman or in the circus. Our idea was to combine getting the food for the feast with teaching people how to forage and dumpster dive; an entirely mutually beneficial set-up. I’m a big believer in learning through doing and this was certainly that.

The whole event was about education and skill-sharing. Some of the people cooking on the day were trained chefs, others had never cooked for anywhere near that many people and some had barely ever cooked for themselves. It was my first effort at building a kitchen from scratch and I learned a lot in a very short time. Everything from gas regulations to the logistics of – without spending a penny in the process – getting an entire kitchen delivered to a venue one day and sent back the next.

While the foragers and dumpster divers were busy finding food from the wild and the dumpsters, I linked up with local food businesses and organizations. I went to meet Pete and Jacqui, two organizers from the Bristol branch of Fareshares, to see if they wanted to get involved. I had a huge amount of admiration for the work they were doing. Just like everyone else we spoke to, Pete and Jacqui said a very enthusiastic ‘yes’. Fareshares has set up formal links with some supermarkets; whenever the supermarkets know they won’t be able to sell some of their food, Fareshares picks it up and delivers it to places, like homeless people’s shelters, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive without it. But sometimes, even they had too much waste food to get rid of. They were happy to help and I promised to mention them in any interviews I did on the day. From them, we got everything from bread (some two hundred organic loaves), beans, and Bombay mix for snacks, to the loan of three hundred glasses. Their contribution eventually became a large van full of a couple of tons of food; enough to supply the basics of the meal.

I set up links with a few local wholesalers, who also suffered the frustration of being bound, by law, to throw good food in the bin. A local organic food co-operative, Essential, supplied a few types of food that we couldn’t get from Fareshares: couscous, bulgur wheat, rice, flour, nachos, rice and soy milk, potato chips, chocolate, and huge bags of other snacks. Either we were in luck
or our current food system is wasteful in the extreme. Experience told me it was the latter.

One crucial ingredient was missing: alcohol. But Andy Hamilton, and a team of merry home-brewers, was ready. Three weeks before Buy Nothing Day 2009, they’d started, brewing up about ninety gallons of beer. They made everything from molasses beer and yarrow ale to a spicy brew containing ingredients, such as cinnamon, that I would never have imagined working in an alcoholic drink. But they did; all the brews came out fantastically well. A couple of gallons of spirits were donated from people’s drinks’ cabinets. We officially had a party going on.

Francene, Fergus, Cai, and I went out the night before the Feastival. After walking down a few dead ends, we struck gold in one dumpster: seven hundred jars of organic fair-trade chocolate spread that would have cost £2000 ($3000) in the grocery stores a few weeks earlier. Being mostly sugar, realistically, it would still have been fine to eat in five years’ time. But the law is the law and doesn’t allow for much human discretion.

The three-course feast – indeed all the food on the day – would be totally vegan. But we were missing a vital ingredient: fruit and vegetables. I got some from Christina, from Somerset Organic Links, an organic farmers’ co-operative that pools their harvests and resources in a successful attempt to halt the large supermarkets’ control of the food industry. Christina eventually supplied some two hundred pounds of vegetables; fantastic, but about three hundred pounds short of what we needed.

Abby (an American who’d moved to the UK with ideas of living without money) led a team of dumpster divers for a couple of nights, coming back with vegetable bounties galore. But even that wasn’t anywhere near enough to meet the demand we anticipated. We organized a team, Elly, Fergus and Cai, to go to the local fruit and vegetable market, from which about fifteen wholesalers operated. It was a risky strategy. They
couldn’t go until the morning of the Feastival; if they went any earlier, the wholesalers wouldn’t have had their final orders or know what was about to go off. But, deciding it was our best bet, the team went along anyway. I was pretty nervous; thousands of people were expecting food. And just a couple of hours before the morning team of twenty-five expected to start preparing and cooking the vegetables, we had only half of what we needed.

This was the morning of my last ‘official day without money’. I stayed behind for interviews, while the final dumpster crew went off, fingers firmly crossed. I tried to focus on plugging the Feastival and the website in every interview I could, but my mind couldn’t help wandering to the wholesale market, wondering whether the team was being escorted off the premises empty-handed. In the middle of an interview for BBC Radio Kent, Fergus’s local station, I got a text message from Cai: the eagle had landed and they had a van full of food. The guys at the market were happy to help: they also hated the weekly routine of throwing out good vegetables every Saturday morning. The Freeconomy Feastival was on!

Food was only one part of the day. Elsie and Katey, two volunteers from Stroud (a small town north of Bristol), spent two weeks gathering clothes for a massive free clothes shop and swap, to which anyone could come, leave things they were bored with, or take stuff they liked. They also made a creative corner to show people how to repair clothes and make useful things from stuff like old packaging. Julia, Elly and Di gathered books for a book shop and swap, collecting hundreds of books before the day even began. I organized a day-long programme of eight talks, including people like Claire Milne (one of the food policy advisors for Transition Towns), Alf Montagu (regular contributor to television shows on freeganism), Ciaran Mundy (an alternative economics advisor for Transition Towns), Fergus (on making all
sorts of ridiculous stuff from wild food) and me, sharing my experiences of living without cash for a year.

Sarah volunteered to organize the day’s entertainment, collecting some of the best-loved musicians on the Bristol scene. These bands would usually cost a tidy sum to hire for the night, even if you’re lucky and they were available on a Saturday evening. She didn’t have to ask any of them; they contacted her, offering to perform for free. They seemed just as enthused as we were. Not content with that, Sarah also managed to get a pedal-powered stage from a local project, Bicyclette, which meant the entire night’s music would be off-grid. People from the crowd took fifteen-minute stints on the bike to keep the amplification going. I’d managed to get a smoothie bike – a pedal-powered smoothie maker – from the Bristol Food Hub. This kit would normally cost anywhere between $225 and $375 for a day’s hire, but both organizations offered it for free. It seems that when you start something with the intention of giving and not taking, it is almost impossible to stop others wanting to do the same.

I organized a free movie theater where we showed movies with different themes: ‘Money as Debt’, ‘The Story of Stuff’, ‘Earthlings’, ‘The Age of Stupid’ and ‘The Transition Movie’. We also had an incredibly funny, yet enlightening, stand-up comedy piece by Rob Newman:
The History of Oil
. Some alternative health practitioners, from a few floors up the building, who normally charged over $45 an hour for acupuncture, massage, and other therapies, offered their services for free. I saw the therapists later, enjoying the food and ale and dancing to the music. This reinforced my belief that there really was another way of doing things, a way based on giving rather than exchange. A way that could really work.

After three full days of getting the venue set up and the food sorted, the day was upon us. I had a pretty busy schedule, including a series of sixteen interviews, starting at six o’clock in
the morning and going on through the day. One of these was a live interview on BBC News 24, which was partially responsible for the massive lines that formed outside Hamilton House from the moment the doors opened. On top of the interviews, I had the small matter of a fourteen-hour free festival to organize, including giving a ninety-minute talk in the middle.

It sounds worse than a date with Sarah Palin. But it was one of the most fulfilling days you could possibly imagine. The atmosphere – both in the kitchen and the crowd – was incredibly positive and uplifting. The thousands who came really could not understand how it was all for free, with no donations or funding allowed. People from many different socio-economic backgrounds (I saw business people and homeless folk talking as people, not labels) came together to enjoy a rare day in which everything they could imagine was totally free.

By seven in the evening, my only remaining task was to sit back, eat the amazing food that the kitchen team had prepared, including Fergus’s fantastic sea beet sorbet and various curry and pasta dishes, and drink good home-brewed organic ale while listening to some of my favorite bands. Four weeks of intense work had paid off. We fed almost one thousand people at least one dish each, and over three and a half thousand people came through the door. People talked about it for weeks afterwards, unable to believe it really was all done without spending a penny. Freeconomy, it seemed, was definitely no longer the domain of greenies, lefties, and hippies.