Book Review: Free – Adventures On The Margins Of A Wasteful Society by Katherine Hibbert
Katherine Hibbert was working as a journalist when the recession led to her losing her job. At just the same time she was unlucky enough to become a victim of the increase in mortgage rates meaning her rent increased as her income slumped to nothing. Deciding on a route out took some thought.
Free: Adventures On The Margins Of A Wasteful Society tell the true story of Katherine who decided to give it all up – the flat, the regular employment, the car and the bank account and instead set herself the challenge to try and live off the things that most of us in our highly material society throw away.
For a home, Katherine took up squatting in disused buildings often with a motley group of others. Interestingly it seems that while many of the squatters she met were the typical “dreadlocks and placards” brigade, just as many were students, foreign workers living on a minimum wage and so on. Many squatters chose to do so rather than being forced to through lack of income or sickness.
For food Katherine lived on what she found in rubbish bins. Shunning private households she found far better pickings in the bins behind businesses. Supermarkets, cafes and restaurants were regular haunts where she found a wide range of food in fully edible condition. Indeed, the author claims she actually ate a healthier, more balanced and varied diet like this than when she used to have to pay for her food with her meagre earnings.
Lastly, any other needs were filled from cast-offs either directly from donors or found once again amongst the rubbish other people threw away. From a mattress for her squat, to furniture, lamps, TVs and bicycles the author discovered that while she had to spend time searching she could find virtually anything she needed with a little patience. She even managed to sell some of the items she found to enable her to pay for essentials like her phone bill.
The story is both well written but also quite shocking for a number of reasons. Firstly, Katherine went to places and did things that I think few of us would feel comfortable doing. While legal, squatting is generally frowned upon and going through rubbish bins is, in the UK at least, illegal. Equally Katherine found very little resistance from the police or bin men when it came to the crunch and so was free to enjoy the spoils of her labor.
The real take-home from this book is not that we should all go out squatting. For me it’s something I disapprove of. I believe that if someone owns a property, you have no moral right to break in and live their yourself just because they’re not using it and the author spends considerable time trying to argue her case which, for me, fell on deaf ears.
The really gripping element for me was to see the other side of what we throw away. To see how Katherine lived a healthy year on what we throw away. She discusses facts and statistics about our rubbish and tells of many cases where even piling her rucksack full of food she was still unable to carry home everything she found. It seems there is enough food being thrown away to support a huge sub-culture like this and I found myself regularly turning over corners of pages so I could come back to salient points again with ease in the future.
As an example, the book tells of a government-funded agency called WRAP which examines the waste we throw away and it estimates that in the UK alone 4.1 million tons of food per year is thrown away unnecessarily. Not only is this tremendously wasteful but of course the point has been argued before that if we wasted less food, we would need to produce less which would lead to reduced environmental degradation and fewer wild areas being taken over for agriculture.
All in all, the squatting issue aside, Free: Adventures On The Margins Of A Wasteful Society is an exciting, interesting and thought-provoking book well worth adding to your book collection. Be prepared to go on a journey that will amaze you…
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Great book review, thanks! I've added it to my Amazon list for my next purchase.
The squatting issue is a delicate one for me, too. But the rest of her experience sounds very interesting.
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