Rising food prices, soaring utility bills, credit crunch ... it’s all pretty depressing these days. Yet, as the country hurtles towards the locust years, I wonder if the nouveau pauvre isn’t such a bad look. After all, conspicuous consumerism is kind of déclassé, non? Even Vivienne Westwood has been telling people to stop shopping. Money, it seems, is rapidly going out of fashion. So, for one week only, I decided to stop using it and join the “freeconomy” – a friendly and burgeoning community based on bartering and swapping.

“The problem with money is that sometimes there is none,” says John Rogers, the founder of Value for People (valueforpeople.co.uk), an organisation that specialises in “community currency, time banking and co-production”. “But people are willing to work and there are the raw materials. The future of the planet depends on biodiversity – but we also need financial diversity.”

So what, exactly, can human capital buy? When Mark Boyle, a freeconomy campaigner, headed off to India on foot, with the intention of living solely by trading favours for favours, he got as far as Calais. How far would I get before I was written off as a freeloader?

Eating for free

There are various means – from supermarket grazing to ploughing through your apocalypse rations of past-sell-by-date larder staples.

Sadly, I can’t recommend cadging from the deli counter, so I approached a man with an allotment (the grow-your-own movement is, well, growing – vegetable-seed sales are up 60% from last spring). “Perhaps I could do your weeding in exchange for a turnip or two?” Result: six tasty organic carrots and three black radishes (I came at the deadest time of the year, apparently). The fallout was a good hour of scrubbing (the veg, then myself) and three hours of travel and labour – not exactly a nice little earner. I was still hungry.

For spiritual, physical and comic nourishment, my local Hare Krishna temple lays on a free, pretty-tasty-for-vegan lunch. There is, however, a price: quite a lot of proselytising.

Then there is that other cult, the Freegans – feral foragers who mop up society’s excesses by living off discarded food. I tried to locate someone to take me dumpster-dining, but they proved elusive: “Why inform the public?” one said. “It just gets dumpsters locked and brings more competition.” Secretly relieved, I turned instead to Wild Food, a new National Trust book on how to harvest nature’s free fruits. “It’s a tricky time of year,” warns its author, Jane Eastoe. “I would start with nettle soup. Nettles are incredibly good for you – full of vitamin C, potassium and calcium.” The calorie count, however, is equivalent to chewing on air. “Free food gives you a glow of virtue,” she chirrups. All I got was a mouthful of bitter grit. Eastoe also recommends roadkill: “Just wait for the first maggot to drop – that indicates it’s tender.” Roll on the summer, for blackberries, plums, wild strawberries and more.

Dressing for free

With so much disposable fashion swilling around, it’s hardly surprising that fashion fans are “shwopping” – clothes swapping.

At Swap-a-Rama (myspace.com/swaparamarazzmatazz), a roving club night, people swap what they are wearing for something they prefer from a neighbour every time a klaxon sounds. Tupperware-style “swishing” parties (swishing.org) are a more productive take on the theme.

It’s a concept that works well online. Whatsmineisyours.com allows its users to swap dresses, shoes, bags and so on. It even features eBay-style ratings. While there are more than 1,000 swaps a month, there is also a good deal of trash: “Some users are scared to say no,” admits the website’s founder, Judy Berger. “Sometimes I do tell them to take their stuff to the charity shop.”

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