All posts by trevor

Closed today Saturday 18th July

Yep, sorry to say that this is another Saturday opening that no volunteers are available to cover.

In Summer especially we get stretched a bit thin, as people go on holiday or just plain flake out in the heat.

We’re reliably open on Thursdays, and usually Fridays too, but Saturdays can be a problem, so do please check here before setting off if you’re travelling from any significant distance. We will do our best to post here if it’s likely we’ll be closed.

No bread Thursday 25th June

Damion, who supplies our bread, reckons his home is hot enough already so he won’t be baking this week! 🥵

Looking forward to cooler temperatures and fresh bread next week.

Eat Infinity’s shorts!

Our main supplier Infinity Foods — a workers’ co-op based in Brighton –has started a channel offering tasty recipes for quick consumption via the screen of your fondleslab. The majority of the ingredients you can get from us. Four dishes so far, all wholefood plant-based and delicious!

Why we need to defend cash

Selection of cash at the British Museum. Credit: Blatant World (CC-BY licence)

Novara Media just published a long interview with anthropologist and former financial services worker Brett Scott, talking about money.

One of the key themes in Cloudmoney, the book that Brett Scott is doing the rounds promoting, is the need to defend and encourage cash — “the bicycle of payments” — as we make a point of doing at Fareshares.

The interview is a pretty broad exploration of money and politics, but here’s where they begin to discuss cash in particular:
https://yt.minnix.dev/4f3PN4UOMA8?t=2395

Lots of interesting stuff, including how the progressive veneer of the fintech industry has mobilised the urban graduate class to act as the vanguard of the privatisation of payments, how the “left” and “right” elements of the pro-cash movement currently sit in relation to each other, how the elimination of cash plays into power (corporate, state and geopolitical), and how we might build a cultural movement to defend the right to a non-corporate, offline form of payment.

[The above link is to an Invidious proxy, which lets you watch YouTube videos free of Google’s tracking, advertising, profiling and bubbling. Another advantage of using an Invidious proxy is that you can click the little headphone icon next to the video title and it switches to audio-only. But for posterity/reference the direct YouTube link is this.]

Did you send us a cheque?

We recently received a generous donation in the form of a cheque through the post made out to “fareshare.org.uk” (sic).

Banks are a bit picky about the payee details being correct on cheques, and we don’t think that our bank will allow us to pay it in, unfortunately, especially as there is another similarly named organisation (whom we predate by five years or so) called FareShare (without the final “s”).

If you are the kind person who sent us the cheque and happen to see this in the next week or so, please either drop in to the shop when we’re open, or get in touch with us via email at info@fareshares.org.uk so that we can sort this out.

Or indeed you are very welcome to send us another cheque made out to “Fareshares Food Co-operative”, and we’ll tear up the other one!

If we don’t hear anything, we will return the cheque to the issuing bank who will no doubt get in touch with our would-be benefactor.

If you would like to donate to Fareshares to help cover our outgoings (rent and bills) so our volunteers can continue to provide the cheapest organic wholefood in London, the best way is via bank transfer and our details are here.

Donate

VEG1 is back in stock

VEG1, the affordable and reliable source of nutrients in which vegans are often deficient

If you’ve been to Fareshares in the past few months hoping to get your VEG1 supplement, you’ll have found yourself out of luck. Sorry about that!

We’re glad to say we now have VEG1 back in stock, in 90-tablet pots (orange or blackcurrant flavours) — a three-month supply for one person — at £6.60 each, working out at around 7p a day.

If you haven’t come across VEG1 yet, it’s a nutritional supplement developed by The Vegan Society which provides an affordable, reliable source of vitamins B12, B2, B6 and D3, folic acid, iodine and selenium, covering all your bases.

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.

Herbs are back

We’ve finally restocked on some herbs and spices, thanks to the enthusiasm and effort of volunteers Laura and Lucy. We have cumin seeds, black peppercorns, fennel seeds, cinnamon quills, thyme, chamomile flower, mixed herbs.

Sourced in bulk from the Organic Herb Trading Company in Somerset and painstakingly packed into 25g and 50g paper bags for minimal packaging waste and maximum value.

Come and get ’em!