‘One-hundred per cent discount on all merchandise is policy at The Free Store, 901 Cole street.’
—San Francisco Chronicle, 13 August 1967
‘Why? Because we are fucking stupid and ran out of ideas. Now we need the money back.’
—Text from posters put up by the KLF in Liverpool in 2017, twenty-three years after they burned a million pounds on the Scottish island of Jura
‘We know that wasting food is a total waste of everything, money, labour, love, energy, resources—the indebted cost of food waste is far, far greater than chucking out a bag of tomatoes. When you know the story and the life cycle of that food, I think you’ve got greater value for it.’
—Annika Stott, sustainability strategist, OzHarvest1
I was eighteen when British rave band the KLF incinerated a million pounds on camera just because they could, and I was livid. If they didn’t want it, why not give it to Greenpeace? Or me? I felt the same when Malcolm McLaren’s son Joe Corré set fire to five million quid’s worth of Sex Pistols memorabilia in 2016. ‘Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need,’ he said. ‘The illusion of an alternative choice. Conformity in another uniform.’ Corré’s mother, the passionate environmentalist fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, joined in; she drove to the site in a double-decker bus and delivered a speech about renewables. But as Vogue commented, ‘How can it make sense to agitate for clean energy from the back of a dirty old bus, and by burning a bunch of acetates and some PVC pants and letting the fumes belch into the air?’2 I can’t help imagining Viv and her boy had strong words behind closed doors: ‘Just sell the effing lot at Christie’s and give the cash to Cool Earth.’ Burning money is a rich man’s game.
A ‘frugal movement’ is brewing in response to soaring living costs and feelings of stuffocation. Headlines like ‘Woman saves $37,000 after refusing to buy things for a whole year!’ get clicks. They make us wonder what we could do with all that extra dosh: book a holiday? put the kids through school? The woman in question, Michelle McGagh, a journalist and self-styled ‘professional tight-arse’, paid off a chunk of her mortgage with it, then wrote a book called The No Spend Year. Frugalistas seem to be mostly concerned with their bank statements. More interesting to me are those who are rethinking the whole concept of money. I’m talking about the freegans, foragers, barterers and swappers, and the 1960s Diggers.
The original Diggers, also called True Levellers, were a group of egalitarian seventeenth-century English radicals who objected to the enclosures that robbed country folk of common land. Their leader Gerrard Winstanley believed that landlords accrued their wealth ‘either by Oppression, or Murther [murder] or Theft’3 and that all land should belong to everyone equally. What’s more, buying and selling, as concepts, were no good because someone always ended up rich, someone impoverished. Radical bloke, Gerrard Winstanley.
Fast forward. In the mid-1960s, a group of young actors formed a guerilla theatre group in San Francisco, taking their name from the English Diggers. These new Diggers wrote their own material and made the streets their stage. One of them, Peter Coyote, went on to become a film star (he played the government agent in E.T.), but in the ’60s the Diggers were anarchist revolutionaries. ‘The Diggers didn’t stand for anything but they were about personal authenticity,’ said Coyote. Another Digger (non)leader conceded that they had goals, one being to ‘put “free” in front of anything you could think of.’ Their artist friend Jeff Berner summed it up nicely: ‘Clouds are free. Sunsets are free. Birds. Mountains. Rivers are free. Why not objects and people?’
The Diggers viewed money as ‘an unnecessary evil’, and argued that since ‘food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there … [a] perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street.’4 Failing that, there was the Free Store. The first two opened in San Francisco’s Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury districts in 1967, and the social experiment spread. Wherever there was a commune, there was a free box. As the hippies and runaways began to descend on the Haight after the first Human Be-in in San Fran’s Golden Gate Park, a young doctor who’d turned on to LSD opened the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic with the slogan, ‘Health care is a right not a privilege’. Hippies on bad trips were treated gratis with ‘a talk-down guide’ and a lava lamp. If they returned from their travels hungry, they could rely on a bowl of Digger stew.
In October 1967, The New Yorker’s popular ‘Talk of the Town’ column wrote up a free store downtown, explaining, ‘Diggers are hippies who help other hippies, so everything in the Free Store is given away.’ The shop stocked used clothing, and ‘piles of miscellaneous junk spread out on rough wooden tables, which line the walls. In one window, a bright-coloured hand-lettered sign reads, “DON’T WASTE. GIVE TO THE DIGGERS”.’
I’ve always loved a story Peter Coyote tells about hanging around (never say ‘working’) in the Haight-Ashbury Free Store one day: ‘A customer might ask to see the manager and be told that they were the manager. Some people froze and waffled, unsure of how to respond.’5 Just like at Marina DeBris’s Inconvenience Store, ‘some left, but some “got it”.’ Others ‘accepted the invitation to re-do the store according to their own plan, which was the point. One’s life was one’s own, and if you could leap the hurdles of programmed expectations and self-imposed limits, the future promised boundless possibilities.’ Anyways, this woman comes in and tries furtively to shoplift and Coyote tells her, ‘You can’t steal here,’ and she gets indignant and denies it. So he says, ‘But you thought you were stealing. You can’t steal here because it’s a Free Store. Read the sign, everything is free! You can have the whole fucking store if you feel like it. You can take over and tell me to get lost.’ They spent the rest of the day ‘shopping’ together.
In broader society, shopping with money won the culture war, but the Diggers weren’t the last radicals to imagine a different way. The futurist Jacque Fresco regarded the world’s resources as the common heritage of all people, and, through his Venus Project in California made the case for a moneyless society. ‘Whenever money is involved, there is elitism,’ he writes in his 2002 book The Best That Money Can’t Buy, proposing ‘a resource-based economy [that] would use technology to overcome scarce resources and utilize renewable sources of energy.’6 In Fresco’s alternative future, intelligent machines will replace human labour and we all achieve higher standards of living. There will be no more planned obsolescence. Distribution centres will allow us to ‘check out’ whatever we need wherever we go, and since there’s no value in selling these things, we’ll be happy to give them back when we’re done. If there were no money, there would be no wage slaves, and no one marginalised by low income. Yes, this would take a complete overhaul of society—we would need to develop a new incentive system (one based on sharing and equality, please), and surely those who benefit from the current system would fight, possibly to the death, to defend it—but until Fresco himself died aged 101 in 2017, he was convinced it was possible.
There is evidence that some of this moneyless malarkey is now happening in regular society. New tech-based, community-minded methods for free transactions are emerging as the share economy takes shape. Apps and social-networking sites make it easy to swap skills and material goods, while community swap meets for things like clothes and books are increasingly popular.
Free stores come and go (mostly go, as rents aren’t as cheap as they used to be). In New York, an activist ran one from Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side for more than fifteen years, suspending her free wares on a fence after dark and inviting customers to take what they pleased. Her primary motive, she said, was to keep things out of landfill.7 Close by, a couple of artists opened a pop-up free shop in 2015, but that was more of a pretentious statement than a true free-for-all. In Kamikatsu, our Japanese zero-waste village, there’s a permanent kuru-kuru (circular) shop, where residents can donate unwanted items that are made available to others for free. In suburban Melbourne, the Really, Really Free Markets have become regular events where money, bartering and trading are banned, while online, Freecycle is thriving. Amanda Chapman sourced the kitchen cabinetry for her tiny house that way.
Initially, when Chapman offered me her dumpster cake, I was reluctant to partake—who wants to eat from a garbage can? Not me when I’ve just been researching bin juice—but when I heard her story, I changed my mind. Chapman’s freezer was crammed with cakes from an upmarket grocery chain, individually wrapped and perfectly safe to eat. Whoever’d chucked them, because they had reached their display-by date, had used the compost rather than the landfill bin. ‘You can’t compost plastic,’ Chapman rolled her eyes, ‘unless it’s PLA, maybe. That person was an idiot.’
There are those who know everything there is to know about the music of Miles Davis, or the history of Wales 400–1100, but Chapman’s specialist subject is food waste. It began when she was still in high school and working a part-time job as a supermarket checkout chick. ‘They had a plastic bag collection point, and one night they asked me to take it out the back. I said, “Where’s the recycling bin?” and they said, “No, it goes in the skip.”’ That was bad enough, but seeing what else was in there made her blood boil. The bin contained edible, unspoiled food.
Food waste happens at the store level because of overstocking—customers like to browse packed shelves. When perishables reach their display-by date, they are removed. These dates refer to peak freshness; they don’t mean that the food is ‘off’, and yet how many of us automatically throw away food because it has passed its sell-by date? It’s nonsense; a tub of tzatziki hasn’t turned rancid because it’s twenty-four hours older than when it was ‘fresh’ the day before, nor has a packet of gourmet cake. We also, of course, waste food at home because, like the supermarkets, we overstock—we buy carelessly, seduced by our culture of convenience. If you’d had to grow that tomato, you’d be more likely to appreciate it.
OzHarvest claims that almost half of all the fruit and vegetables commercially grown go to waste. Most ‘imperfect’ fresh produce that doesn’t reach supermarket standards (wrong size, wrong shape, wrong colour) gets wasted before it ever makes it to the shop floor, and there have been several high-profile campaigns and news stories about this; the outrageous sight of banana mountains and rivers of oranges helps inspire change. Nevertheless, much of the ‘ugly’ fruit that slips through still ends up in the bin. (In Australia, Woolworths and Harris Farm Markets are trying to solve this by selling it cheaper with cute marketing—‘the odd bunch’ etcetera. Alas, at Woolies, it’s packed in plastic.) Supermarkets also turf damaged products, over some minor fault with the packaging. Chapman once found a crate of olive oil in a dumpster. ‘One bottle had smashed or leaked or something so the rest were oily,’ she says. ‘We can’t have oily oil, now can we?’
When the teenaged Chapman saw a story about dumpster diving freegans on the news, she had a strong urge to join them, ‘But I was young and I still worked for the supermarket. I didn’t dare.’ It was several years later that she made her first freegan contact, via a subreddit feed. ‘They’d been doing it for years. They were masters students, so hungry and poor, but also political. I just remember they had all these boxes of cereal lining their walls.’ While Chapman didn’t become a dedicated dumpster diver, she still does it occasionally to make a point.
Once, she went with two women who’d messaged her on Facebook. They got caught. ‘We were three young girls with head torches on. Usually you wear dark colours, but I’d just been out so I was wearing florals. I guess we looked non-threatening.’ The security guard left them to it, after asking them to please clean up after themselves. ‘A couple of minutes later, a police car pulled down the alley. They asked us what we were doing, and we showed them about 40 packets of tortillas. We explained that we weren’t trying to break in, and started talking to them about food waste and landfill. We pulled out some statistics, and I said to them, “Who is the criminal here?”’
True freegans, as opposed to casual divers, seek to reduce their participation in the conventional economy as much as possible, while taking the zero-waste ethos to the next level. By opting out of shopping completely, they live by choice on the margins and prioritise freedom over working for The Man. In general, they don’t pay rent; they squat. They don’t own cars; they walk, skate, bike, hitch or train-hop. They grow community gardens in abandoned lots. ‘Urban foraging’ challenges the injustice of allowing resources to go to waste when there are people in need.
About a third of the food produced by the world each year is wasted. In the United States, it’s more like 40 per cent. Yet forty-eight million Americans are food insecure, meaning at some point in the past twelve months they didn’t have enough to eat.8 Kids go to school hungry. Old people rely on Meals on Wheels. National Geographic reporter Tracie McMillan describes how the working poor might look like they’re doing okay, with electronic goods and cars bought on credit, but many subsist on a minimum-wage diet of low-quality processed junk in a ‘twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. Here, dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries.’ Obesity and hunger are ‘two sides of the same coin’.
Australians discard food worth $8 billion a year. One in five bags of groceries ends up in the bin, yet we are still hungry. The Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates food insecurity affects about 5 per cent of the population, but charities put that figure much higher. Perhaps as many as 3.6 million Australians experience it, and while refugees and Indigenous Australians are high risk groups, it can affect anyone. Could food rescue solve the problem? How realistic a solution is urban foraging? And what about community gardens and growing co-operatives? Could we not just grow our own vegetables like previous generations did?
Growing, foraging for and cooking nutritious food takes resources and know-how. If you’re struggling to make the rent and hold down a job, planning dinner harvested from the garden is likely to be low on your to-do list. That’s presuming you have access to a vegetable patch or allotment. One-fifth of Australians live in apartments, and the food-insecure are also more likely to be dealing with insecure housing. Gardening equipment costs money, plants take time to mature, and last time I looked, you couldn’t grow bread and butter out the back.
Inevitably, dumpster diving and foraging tend to be white, middle-class dropout or back-to-the-land pursuits, led by the politically motivated with time to dedicate and the nous to learn where the wild mushrooms that won’t kill you grow. Dumpster diving is illegal. Remember Kimberlé Crenshaw. Amanda Chapman might be let off by sympathetic security guards and get to deliver a speech about the travesty that is food waste, but will Black and brown kids be given the same opportunity?
This story of want, waste and unequal power has led to food activism in innovative forms. Today there are multiple groups making modern-day Digger stew. In America, Food Not Bombs began in 1980 when student protestors set up a soup kitchen outside a bank that was funding a local nuclear power station. They now make rescued dinners for protestors and strikers through hundreds of autonomous chapters across the world. In Amsterdam, dumpster divers started a free supermarket with their excess skip finds, which in 2015 morphed into a massive communal dinner party. Food Waste Feast was ‘a pay-as-you-feel’ three-course dinner held in a shared restaurant space. Two of the organisers went on to start a program to cook rescued food for refugees arriving in Greece via the Balkan route. Feeding the 5000 cooks giant, celebratory public dinners from waste food. The first one was held in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2009, organised by Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal.
Australia’s first big food-rescue organisation was OzHarvest, launched in 2004. In 2016, they set up a free shop in Sydney; customers are asked to contribute what they can, and if that’s nothing, fine. OzHarvest is by no means unique. FareShare works across 1300 towns in the United Kingdom to redistribute surplus food to charities that turn it into meals, and FoodCycle does a similar thing. In New Zealand, a Wellington woman, Robyn Langlands, started the country’s first food-rescue service, Kaibosh, in 2008, inspired by wasted sandwiches. In Dunedin, Deborah Manning started FoodShare from the back of her car with day-old bread saved from supermarkets. I love the idea of New Zealand’s Compost Collective, which connects people who have spare kitchen-scrap waste with those who need mulch.
Amanda Chapman is leading food-waste activism in Auckland. She was inspired by a project called the Solidarity Fridge, which began in a Spanish town near Bilbao where residents and restaurants drop their unwanted food at a public fridge, and anyone who wants it, takes it. There was some city grant money going in Auckland, so Chapman applied and won funds to set up a similar project there. And so it is that a once-vacant CBD lot on the corner of Wellesley Street and Mayoral Drive, already home to an urban bee-keeping collective, is the site of New Zealand’s first Love Food Hate Waste Community Fridge. Volunteers check the temperatures and clean and stock the fridge, but like the Diggers they don’t work there. Nobody owns the food. It is a fridge in common. A cold box of delights that anyone can partake of, and nobody pays.
The kids outnumber the adults. They are running free in the field behind the homestead, clambering over hay bales and picking fruit from two prehistoric-looking Mediterranean fig trees. In the garden, the flowers are thickly spread with bumblebees and butterflies. A table has been set with trays of pots ready for seeding with broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach and kale. Summer, at the height of her powers today, is on notice. Autumn is coming to the Adelaide Hills.
A tiny girl with bits of grass tangled in her hair approaches. She looks me over in silence for a long while. ‘Seeds,’ she says eventually. Then very loud: ‘I plant the seeds!’
‘Should I plant some?’ I ask. She takes my arm and pulls me towards the table.
‘Do you like vegetables?’
‘No!’ she says. ‘I like jam.’
An older lady laughs and hands me an envelope of seeds.
‘How many?’ I need instructions, suddenly out of my comfort zone. They call me Geranium Killer. Once I even presided over the slow death of a desktop cactus.
‘Four,’ says Andrew Barker, tipping in six, then seven seeds into his pots. He clocks me count and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not science; well maybe it is science, but it’s—’
‘Insurance,’ says Jodie, one of a growing band of Grow Free-ers in these parts, where the idea to grow food with the express intention of giving it away was hatched by Barker in 2014, although don’t tell him I told you that. He doesn’t like to take ownership of Grow Free. ‘I think of it as this idea that has come to life through all of us,’ he says.9
I push my finger into the soil, then bed the seeds in, feeling the dirt beneath my nails (too long, should have cut them), and it dawns on me: I have never done this before. ‘I plant the seeds!’ I say, and everyone laughs.
Jodie’s face flickers from amusement to pity and back. We should connect to the Earth and the soil at an early age, learn how green things grow and what it means to plant-whisper and to nurture Nature. Those are life skills, important as learning maths or French. As a kid, I did pick the food that others had grown; I remember it—the treat of the strawberry farm, the weight of the punnet in my sticky hand. Stealing the peas in their pods from a neighbour’s garden and how juicy they were, and illicit.
‘I maybe grew cress at school,’ I say, and Jodie looks relieved. She has six grown-up children. They are country people, raised knowing milk comes from a cow, not a bottle.
Here, some of the young’uns have come back from fig picking and are giving their bounty away. The fruit tastes of sunshine. My tiny jam fan offers me a tiny flower. ‘You should keep this,’ I tell her, ‘it’s so pretty like you.’
‘For you!’ she shouts and runs off chasing butterflies.
In this idyllic garden among friends, sowing seeds and seeing the fruits of his community-building ripen, Andrew Barker should be happy but his eyes are sad. He hasn’t been sleeping, he apologises; he’s feeling low after the breakdown of a relationship. I mention this not to pry into his private life but because Grow Free is life—it’s not about a quick joy fix, although it can and does provide that to the gardeners, givers and receivers involved. Grow Free is one of the biggest ideas I’ve come across writing this book, despite masquerading as a small, humble one. It aims to redraw the way we live in relation to the Earth and to each other. Not just on this golden afternoon when, to me at least, anything seems possible, but all the time, through ups and downs, sickness and health, scarcity and abundance.
‘The idea of Grow Free is to change the way we look at ourselves and our communities, and the way we fit into the world, via the medium of food,’ says Barker. ‘It seems like Grow Free is about free healthy food, and yes, on one level, it is; but that food is also the medium through which we’re trying to create a bigger change. We plant seeds, get together and grow good food and share it amongst neighbours, and if you want to leave it there, then that’s okay, but it can also be about sowing the seeds for a new system. It can be about taking our power back, reinvigorating communities, localism, closing the inequality gap, environmentalism … ’
‘Just, everything then?’
A friend is taking her leave. She came from town to pick beetroots from the garden for a woman who has cancer, and reached out via the Grow Free Facebook page, explaining that she’s feeling too rough to shop or plan meals but knows that she needs to eat healthy, organic vegetables. This project is about the real stuff. And it starts with a seed. Or four.
Barker insists his green revolution ‘just happened, I guess’. He was bookish, studied geology and geophysics. In fact, he was halfway through a PhD on geothermal energy when he decided to live and work communally on an organic farm instead. His parents thought he was literally mad, and didn’t speak to him for years, but Barker wanted a different kind of life.
Some friends were growing vegetables to sell at farmers’ markets, and a chance meeting led them to a sort of Eden. ‘We were dropping off some corn we’d grown in our backyard, and this woman said, “Who grew this corn? It looks great.” Next thing we knew, she was offering us the run of this big farm she had. There were orchards under bird netting, and she wanted someone to take it in hand, and so we moved up there, about three or four of us full-time, although we had a lot of people visiting and helping, and we planted it with veggies and flowers, and with the existing fruit trees it became a paradise.’
I ask if there was a house on the property, imagining some Stealing Beauty scenario, and he laughs and says, ‘We lived in tents.’
‘For a year?’
‘It was wonderful.’ One of them was a French chef and they were totally self-sufficient eating food they’d grown themselves, feeding the land, bringing the butterflies, bees and worms back. ‘It was my first experience on that kind of scale, having so many things planted and making my own compost and worm farms,’ says Barker. ‘It blew my mind.’
One day, he and the chef had cause to visit a supermarket to buy some ungrowable supplies. ‘You know those moments in time that stick in your memory with an emotional charge? We were looking at these pale tomatoes packed in plastic; then we saw the spring onions and they should have dirt in their roots but they were immaculate, and it looked really strange and wrong. It’s an aesthetic, convenience thing I know, but we were just horrified. I remember him saying, “Where is the dirt? How is this food?”’
When Barker left the farm, he packed his love of seeds with him. He was such an effective gardener, he soon had way too many and decided to give them way. ‘I put up notices. I actually had to pay $20 a month to put them on boards to give away free seedlings.’ Then something curious happened. ‘People started coming to me saying they didn’t need more seedlings but “How can we help? What can we do?”’ They began organising working bees. ‘We’d go to someone’s house and help them with their garden and plant the seedlings we’d grown. It was just word of mouth at first.’
The carts followed. Upcycled. Parked in public places. The idea is to load them up with excess produce you’ve grown. ‘There are nearly 170 sharing carts in Australia now,’ says Barker. ‘It has spread to New Zealand. It’s about to go to the United States: there’s going to be a Grow Free sharing cart in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. There’s no reciprocation, no acknowledgement. Mostly we don’t get to see who takes the produce.’ But when Barker holds his seedling days, he enjoys seeing the way people react. Especially when newcomers get involved and taste real food, some of them, clearly, for the very first time.
‘Most of what we think of as food today is a poor representation,’ he tells me. ‘We store it for too long, we wrap it in plastic, we waste it. We grow it in soil that’s been depleted. The big produce farms now run on hydroponic systems. They have to add all the nutrients in; the soil is just somewhere for the roots to go; there’s no worms in there, no compost.
‘The other day I took this family to a garden, and it was the first time any of them had picked an apple from a tree and eaten it. I watched them do it, and their little boy’s face, he was like, “Ahhhhh.” It’s such a different experience.’
Seasonal eating may be a lifestyle buzz phrase, but it’s not how the modern food system works. No, no. That’s all about convenience, profit and demand (and we’re to blame as much as the supermarkets). Apples are picked in Australia between February and May; when you buy one here in December, it’s been ‘asleep’ for months. Apples, pears, onions, carrots, oranges, grapes, pumpkin and bananas are typically cold stored for up to a year. Many are picked too early on purpose, treated with a gas to slow ripening, then cold stored. All this is safe, and produce should retain its nutritional value, but taste suffers. It’s just not the same, is it?
One Victorian restaurateur had this to say about peaches. ‘As soon as there is a little bit of colour they take them off the tree. They put them in dark rooms. They ripen slowly there and when you get them to the table it’s “oh yeah”. This peach almost forgot that it’s been a peach.’10 What’s more, fruit is increasingly genetically modified to taste sweeter, to satisfy palates warped by sugar-packed processed food. All this makes Barker shudder.
‘But we can’t all grow figs in our paddocks,’ I say.
‘I do realise that people living in flats in cities can’t grow much food. They might have a pot of herbs somewhere, but then there are people like me, who will put a crate of veg on one of our carts every week, enough to feed four families. You don’t need a heap of space to grow leafy greens that cost a lot to buy in the supermarket, but are easy and cheap to grow. Let’s all grow what food we can, and share it.’
He tells me a story about a family with a big old lemon tree in their backyard, and how the daughter is sick and got in touch with Grow Free (a recurrent theme), and how they changed the way they eat as a result. The daughter sent Barker a picture of the tree. Realising how much fruit it bears, she wants to give some away.
Grow Free has been trying to persuade local councils to plant free fruit trees in parks, but so far there’s been too much red tape. ‘They always worry about vermin, but why? I think [the trees] would attract hungry people who feel like picking an apple. Imagine if councils planted fruit trees on city streets.’
‘Avenues of apples!’
‘Wouldn’t that be lovely?’
Andrew Barker has a vision that is as grand as it is simple. ‘If you could just loosen constraints on your mind and wander with me for a moment,’ he says.11 ‘Imagine if the face of shopping were to change. Imagine that instead of walking up and down aisles, you get to walk round your neighbourhood and see what’s on offer, see what your neighbours have grown, baked or preserved. Imaging if instead of writing out a large list of things that you need to buy from a supermarket, you instead walk around your block, see what your neighbours have left out for free, see what’s in season, and decide a recipe based on that.’ Imagine.