Thursday 23rd December: 2-4pm
Friday 24th December: 4-7pm
Saturday 25th December: closed
Thursday 30th December: 2-6pm
Friday 31st December: 4-6pm
Saturday 1st January: closed
We expect to be back to normal opening hours from 5th January onwards.
We wish you a happy solar new year, a jolly Yuletide, a merry Christmas, a super Saturnalia, and all the best for 2022!
Our calculators have little solar panels, which is great when there’s light, but inside our windowless shop there isn’t much light, especially in the darker months! So they depend on a little fallback button cell (battery). It’s a little bit tricky to get inside and replace them, but worth doing and the new cells are cheap.
So we’ll have two fully charged calculators for you to use this Thursday!
All being well we will have fridge products such as tofu, miso and spreads back in stock from next Thursday 4th November.
This is due to a customer offering to take on the job of ordering from Suma Wholefoods, after a gap of some weeks where we had no volunteer for this task.
Fareshares is entirely dependent on people volunteering their time, and we are still short of volunteers, so please do give us a hand if you can! Drop your details into the box in the shop next time you’re in.
It’s been great to welcome people back into Fareshares since we reopened fully for self-service back in August.
Our footfall and takings have slowly been recovering, but we’ve noticed that they still aren’t back to the sort of levels we had before the pandemic.
There will be lots of reasons why that might be. Quite a bit of it might be that some people weren’t much into being served at the door, which we did for several months, and haven’t realised that we’re open again.
And others might simply have migrated elsewhere for their food buying. There are quite a few more so-called “zero waste” (nobody is!) outlets these days, for instance.
But we’ll be surprised if people can find anywhere that offers whole organic food cheaper than Fareshares (due to our low overheads and fully volunteer staffing).
And we’d like as many people as possible to benefit from this great resource.
So please, tell your friends about Fareshares, and maybe bring them along yourself to show them how it works. (And where we are — we know, it can be a bit hard to find us!)
You’re generally onto a winner health-wise if you eat the kind of wholefood plant-based diet that Fareshares helps to support, but you can still end up deficient in some vital nutrients.
In particular you risk serious health consequences if you don’t take special steps to make sure you get enough vitamin B12 which, with very few exceptions, is not present in plant foods. Likewise it is difficult to get enough iodine from a strict plant-based diet. And everyone, irrespective of diet, should be supplementing with vitamin D between October and March in these latitudes.
As of this week Fareshares is stocking the Vegan Society’s VEG1, the nutritional supplement developed by The Vegan Society. It provides an affordable, reliable source of vitamins B12, B2, B6 and D3, folic acid, iodine and selenium, covering all your bases.
We have pots of 90 tablets (orange or blackcurrant flavours) — a three-month supply — on sale for £6.60 each, working out at around 7p a day.
Due to a mixup we won’t have any fresh fruit and veg this week. Sorry to disappoint.
We will make an order for next week, available for sale from Thursday 20th.
We have the following fresh produce available from Thursday 7th January 2021…
Leeks
Mixed kale
Onions
Brown mushrooms
Beetroot
Conference pears
Carrots
We’re doing an extra opening for you on Sunday 20th. Then we’re open as usual Thursday 24th, but closed Friday 25th and Saturday 26th. After that we are open normal times on 31st December and 1st and 2nd January.
We’re continuing to build up our stocks and supplies, increasing our bread order and doing our best to have a decent selection of local organic veg to offer you. Due to arrive this week from the Better Food Shed is:
Also this week we’ll be receiving the first order we’ve made from Suma for many months, which will help plug some of the gaps on our shelves and even reintroduce some chilled products again (tofu at least).
What’s more thanks to Zaytoun we have stocked up with our traditional selection of artisanal Palestinian produce, viz organic and fairtrade certified extra virgin olive oil, zesty za’atar (a traditional herb mix), boxes of Medjoul dates, freekeh (smoky green wheat) and maftoul (giant couscous).
We are open for service at the door at our normal opening times (Thurs 2-8, Fri 4-7, Sat 3-5).
So come and stock up your shelves too!
We have been providing the community with wholesome organic food at unbeatable prices for more than 30 years, and we’re not stopping any time soon.
Essential retail is allowed under the national restrictions that have just come into force, as is providing voluntary services.
So we’ll still be here at our usual opening times, serving at the door as before in order to the minimise transmission risk.
This way of serving customers is quite a bit more labour-intensive than the good old self-service muck-in, but we have recently had an influx of wonderful new volunteers, so we are managing OK, and enjoying chatting with regulars and new faces as we get your orders together.
So please keep on shopping at Fareshares.
And bring your brolly if it looks like rain.