A Free Lunch

Margret Thatcher famously said, ‘There's no such thing as a free lunch.'

She was so wrong.

A couple of weeks into November 2009, I received an invitation from wild food man Fergus Drennan  to join him for a meal he was helping to provide in Bristol. This was to be no ordinary meal though; it was to be a feast! Fergus's friend, Mark Boyle, together with other members of the Bristol Freeconomy Community, had set themselves the seemingly impossible task of gathering together enough ingredients, with no cash changing hands, to provide a three-course feast for 300+ people.

I accepted the invitation immediately (who wouldn't!) and spent the next few weeks wondering how on earth they were going to pull it off.

When the day came, I arrived early to help with the food prep. I'm SO glad I did this because I wouldn't have missed being a part of the day for the world. Suffice to say I am a complete convert to the concept of ‘Freeconomy'. That's not to suggest I believe we can all live without cash the way Mark has for a whole year, but the idea of doing ‘something for nothing' - and sharing, say, the tools I hardly ever use, or what skills I have, with someone else ‘just-for-the-love-of-it' - is an idea I embrace with open arms.

I didn't get a chance to talk much with Mark during the day (he was a bit busy!) but he has very kindly agreed to write us an article about the whole experience from conception to execution and here it is; prepare to have your faith in human nature restored!

Brigit

The Freeconomy Freastival 2009

Four weeks before the international Buy Nothing Day 2009 and the official end of my year without money, two friends convinced me to throw a party to celebrate the day. What started out as an ambitious plan to feed 250+ people a three course meal out of completely foraged and waste food, turned into a day where 60 fantastically passionate and tireless volunteers fed and hosted thousands of people with drinks and snacks throughout the day and an ‘as-many-courses-as-you-want' meal in the evening.

It started with an email looking for at least ten volunteers to help make the feast happen. Within days I had 50 folk brimming with enthusiasm, so I called a meeting to organise the day and decide how many we'd aim to feed. The volunteers all showed up with loads of ideas of their own and a four hour meeting later it was no longer a free dinner, it was ‘The Freeconomy Freastival 2009'.

We would aim to serve 300+ people a three course meal out of wild foraged and waste food; have a programme of eight talks by some of the UK's most radical thinkers; and a free cinema showing films such as ‘Money as Debt', ‘The Transition Movie' and ‘Earthlings' - all with a different theme and covering a different aspect of Freeconomy. All day there would be free acupuncture, massage and holistic therapies; a book-swap, a clothes-swap, a creative corner where people could learn to mend clothes and make wallets from tetra-paks and the like; a ‘Freeshop'; snacks and hot drinks; and smoothies made by pedal power. To round it off there would be music from 6pm to midnight, which was to be powered off-grid.

How we were going to do it all was another matter though. We only had three weeks to organise it all, and, whilst everyone took responsibility for making a different part of the day happen, there were some big obstacles to overcome. The first of these was the venue. If the ‘Freastival' was going to be free, then the venue was going to have to be free, but given that it needed to be big enough to handle thousands of people, this wasn't going to be easy. Fortunately, it seems that when you start something with the intention of giving something for nothing, others can't help but to want to do likewise, and the director of one of the best venues in Bristol gave us a fantastic space for free.

The only problem was it didn't have a kitchen, or even running water, so over the next three weeks we were going to have to do what most new cafes or restaurants spend at least three months doing - constructing a new catering kitchen from scratch. Not only that, we'd have to deconstruct it the next day. The only difference being, they have big budgets to do it, and we had zero. So, I made a few calls and before I knew it eight local projects were involved, lending us enough tables, chairs, cutlery, glasses, cooking utensils and pots to feed anything up to one thousand people. This prodded the volunteer driving team into action, and over two days and lots of muscle later we had everything on site.

Now we had a venue, we needed some food. As everything was to be free, not a penny could be spent on ingredients, which is a challenging way to want to feed the masses.

I am a big believer in ‘education-through-doing', so we set up three wild food foraging teams, led by Fergus Drennan (BBC's Roadkill Chef) and Andy Hamilton (co-author of The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible), as well as three skipping teams to go through the bins of Bristol and liberate good food from the fate of landfill. This way, not only would we get the food we needed to feed lots of people, but volunteers would also learn how to forage and bin-dive. Whilst they were out doing that, I contacted a few people who I knew despised throwing out food. FareShare - an excellent organisation who take waste food and distribute it to people who need it all year long - were more than happy to come on board. A local organic farmer's co-operative agreed to give us about a third of our fruit and veg needs, whilst an organic wholesaler said they'd give us any out of date grains and pulses they had, come the time.

On Buy Nothing eve, we had most of the food in, but a few of us decided to go for one last skipping spree. And what a result - in one bin we found 700 jars of organic fair trade chocolate spread, with a retail value of over £2000, which would make a great addition to what was fast becoming a massive Freeshop. There was one last piece to the puzzle, and it was the most stressful part. We still needed about 175kg more fruit and veg, and because of its nature we couldn't look for it until the morning of the Freastival. Fergus and a team of others headed off to the local veg market at 5am. I had to stay back and do media interviews from 6am onwards, where I would be telling the whole world of our plans in the knowledge that if this didn't go well the feast was as good as off. Then, in the middle of one interview, I got a text from one of the guys, saying they'd just scored 200kg of veg, so it was now officially game on!

Whilst all this was happening, the other volunteers got their sections ready; the book and clothes swap looked unbelievably abundant, and the ‘Freeshop' looked like the local Tesco - except that the food was better quality and there was no CCTV or till. Some of the best musicians in Bristol were lined up, all of whom had contacted us to ask if they could play for free for the night, and the amplification was to be powered by a bike. This would be powered by punters doing ten minutes pedalling each whilst working off some of the food they'd eaten in the process.

So, after three weeks of intense planning, organisation and one-day cafe construction, the day was here. Minutes after we opened the doors at 11am we were mobbed, as queues of people formed to get in. The vibe in the place was exceptional; the volunteers were working tirelessly but having a great time, and the public really couldn't believe it was all for free. When the cooking team started looking at the food at 9am, no one knew who was going to do what. By 4pm, tonnes of food had been cooked up and were waiting to be served, ready to prove Maggie wrong and that there was, in fact, such thing as a free dinner. Oh, and how. The food was fantastic, with starters including Fergus' Field Blewit and Wild Garlic Soup, and dessert including his Sea Beet Sorbet.

No party of this scale would be complete without a bit of alcohol, so three weeks earlier we pre-empted this. Andy Hamilton and his team of merry home-brewers got together and came up with over 400 pints of locally grown and foraged ale (the hops came from his allotment). And so by 7pm, after 13 hours of festival coordination (where we fed over 750 people with at least one course each - and hosted over 3000 others), 14 interviews and a 90 minute talk to almost 300 people about my year's experience of living without money and the philosophy behind it, I decided to take a few hours off, have a pint of yarrow ale (my personal favourite) and listen to some fantastic music. I finally managed to actually celebrate the end of my year, and a freastival where not only everyone survived, but thrived.

The day had been one of the most uplifting of my life. To see everybody giving so much for no other reason than to make other people happy and to show them that another way really is possible brought tears to my eyes. I was in love again with humanity. Our capability for destroying things is only surpassed by our capability for such wonderful acts of kindness and caring. Even if it was for just one day, this was Freeconomy in action - thousands of people freely giving and receiving, in the magical dance of Nature that our entire ecosystem is based on. I left that night knowing that this can become reality, and that we must not stop until it is so.

Mark Boyle www.justfortheloveofit.org/home

Top three photos (c) Megan Orpwood-Russell

Bottom photo (c) Nadia Catkin

Other links....
FareShare South West www.faresharesouthwest.org.uk/
Fergus Drennan www.wildmanwildfood.com/
Andy Hamilton www.selfsufficientish.com/main/blog.php/