AI Representation: A desert shelter with foraged food, a backpack and discarded goods representing Suelo’s moneyless way of life. Image credits: Chatgpt
Daniel Shellabarger, who later became known as Daniel Suelo, decided to live without money in autumn 2000 after leaving his last thirty dollars in a phone booth at a truck stop in Pennsylvania, according to an account by Clay Bonnyman Evans published in The Coloradan. Mark Sundeen’s book The Man Who Quit Money , published in 2012, gave an account of Suelo’s way of life in the vicinity of Moab, Utah, where Suelo lived in a cave and gathered wild foods, as well as collected leftover food. This article looks at Suelo’s lifestyle alongside two other sources: a 2006 psychology study on money and a federal report on food waste. Sundeen’s version, as quoted in the blog Citydesert, depicts the 12 years of living without money in which Suelo lived on wild edibles, scavenged food, some roadkill and gifts. An Associated Press profile of Suelo, published in the Summit Daily in 2009, provides additional details. The Coloradan reported in 2013 that he had lived in a cave outside Moab for 13 years. Peace Corps Online’s account of his 2000 hitchhike shows he did not stay in one place. In a 2021 profile, Utah Stories reported that he had made a home near Moab during the 1990s, before he gave up money. USDA food waste estimates for 2010: 133 billion pounds, 31 percent The food recovered by Suelo fits into the national pattern, which is well-established. 133 billion pounds, out of 430 billion pounds of food available for consumption, were wasted in 2010, which is 31% of the available food, retail value of which was estimated at $161.6 billion, according to the statistics provided there. Retailers wasted 43 billion pounds of food, which is 10% of the available amount, and consumers wasted 90 billion pounds, which is 21%, according to the estimates provided by the agency. The amount of wasted calories amounted to 387 billion per day, and meat, poultry and fish accounted for 30% of the total value lost. The agency reported that there was an average loss of 1,249 calories per person per day. Meat, poultry, and fish constituted 30 percent of the food wasted in terms of value, amounting to $48 billion.
Because of the scavenged food, suelo assured the reporter that he never got sick. Because he saw it as a form of money, the Deseret News reported, he rejected barter. In a blog post reproduced by Peace Corps Online , Suelo described money as a stand-in for the past as debt and the future as credit, never the present. The man had led a moneyless life, which is different from total self-reliance, since Suelo would accept any freely donated gifts and rejected any money or bartering system. Suelo went through Moab’s garbage once a week and found more than enough for himself. In an interview on Becoming Minimalist, he disagreed with the intro calling him boastful for avoiding food stamps and any other government assistance since it might imply that he considers himself superior to those who need such help. Gordon Stevenson, who directed a film about Suelo, talked to AP about the contradiction between Suelo’s way of life and his reliance on people who use money. USDA’s Economic Research Service published a paper titled “The Estimated Amount, Value, and Calories of Postharvest Food Losses at the Retail and Consumer Levels in the United States. Reasons for wastage at the retail level included broken equipment like malfunctioning cold storage, ordering more than required and discarding damaged produce. This is shown by Suelo’s experience of the visible effect of food wastage; however, there are many other kinds of wastage included in the above statistics that cannot be recovered from trash.
