THE WHOLESOME TRUTH – WELCOME TO MY BLOG

Proprietor Sally Hayes

Hello, I'm Sally Hayes and I run Tod Almighty.  I've started this blog because I want to offer some back-story on why we sell what we do, why we think some of our suppliers are brilliant, and ideas for living more sustainably.  I hope you enjoy reading it.  You can reply to any of the posts below (but replies are moderated to avoid spam) – I look forward to hearing from you!

Sally

Posts from the year 2021...


27 Oct 2021

Reducing plastic waste

Reduce plastic waste. Refill not landfill. It's painted in bright yellow letters on our shop front. It's what we believe. Our shop offers you the chance to shop ethically, sustainably and healthily. But what about at home?

Recycling
An obvious one but one that bears repeating. While household recycling rates in England are going in the right direction (45.5% in 2019) it has begun to slow in recent years. Regardless of these statistics, we must keep recycling or repurpose our household waste – and we need to do it properly. One of the common mistakes people make is not knowing exactly where certain items can be recycled. While the Council's weekly collection is vital, it's important to know exactly what goes in which bin, bag or sack. Wrong items that end up in the wrong place adds more time at the sorting depot and if the wrong material gets missed it can affect whether certain collections can be recycled effectively at all.





Make sure you know what goes where. This is a useful guide to get started:https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/v2/residents/environment-planning-and-building/waste-and-recycling/recycling/a-z#books

Any items that the Council is unable to recycle can often be repurposed elsewhere. For example, you could use an old rug on your homemade compost heap to keep the heat in. Or sell them on or donate to charity shop.

Reduce
Reusable coffee cups and water bottles are almost a fashion statement now but that's no bad thing. As long as we don't end up buying a new one every few months – defeats the point somewhat.

And just as fashionable: tote bags. While we do offer paper bags for a small fee in the shop, we encourage all of our customers to come prepared with a bag for their shopping. And hopefully by promoting it in our shop, customers will get used to doing it elsewhere. But do be careful when purchasing your next tote bag. Find out what it's made from, a blend of recycled and organic cotton or hemp is actually better than 100% organic cotton. Tote bags or shoppers should be a long-term purchase, helping you with your shopping for years to come.

Repurpose
If you're crafty, there are so many ways you can repurpose everyday household items. Just a quick Google comes up with hundreds of ideas but here's a few:
  1. Old jars are perfect for repurposing. Many of our customers use them as containers for our wholefood refills. We also use them in the shop for charity jams.
  2. Hold on to your coffee grounds, they make a great fertiliser.
  3. You can use the wooden sticks from an ice lolly as labels for your plants and flowers when they are just seedlings.

One final challenge...
Lots of tips here, bit one of the best ones we can give you is to remove your general waste bin altogether. Try it out for a week and see how you get on. It will give you more incentive to check if the items you are purchasing are made of materials that can be recycled and better understand your options outside of the weekly recycling pick up.

 


09 Sep 2021

Organic September

The nights are drawing in, the leaves are changing. It’s September – more specifically, it’s Organic September.

All our fruit and veg at Tod Almighty is organic and this is hugely important to us. We also stock as many other organic products as possible such as dry wholefoods (nuts, grains, rice etc.), household and skincare products.




Run by the Soil Association, Organic September is a month-long campaign to raise awareness of the many benefits of organic food and farming. Organic farming is a way of growing food that works in harmony with the natural world and enhances rather than damages it. That means NO pesticides, NO artificial fertilisers and NO genetic modification.

The impact that a systemic change to organic farming could have on our planet is astonishing. A recent report modelling a Europe that transitioned all farming to agroecology (an application of ecological concepts and principals in farming), found that agricultural emissions could drop by 40-50% by 2050 – with plenty to feed the growing population healthy diets.

This is subject that is core to our business values, we’ve previously written about the benefits of organic food in our previous blog post ‘Organic Food – you know it makes sense’.

While a whole system change is key it can sometimes feel overwhelming. What can you as an individual do to help make a positive impact on our planet and for your health?

The Soil Association have set up Pledge for Our Planet to help you make the small actions that can add up to a big result. Below are some focused on food and diet. As customers of Tod Almighty you may already be doing most of these but each commitment makes a difference and the more you do the better.

Eat two meals a week with seasonal food grown in the UK

 - We stock lots of organic fruit and veg grown in the UK. Our main delivery day is Wednesday with an additional topup on each Friday. We get our produce from Organic North and Organic Pantry, as well as local growers in the valley.

Grow one fruit or veg crop this season

 - Growing your own food is a surefire way to help you appreciate the food on your plate. You don’t need an allotment, just some time, space and sunshine. We’re just coming into harvest season but it’s worth planning ahead for next year. How about a few tomatoes on your windowsill, or some peppers? 

Shop at your local indie once a week

 - We can certainly help with this! And you only need to commit to doing it once a week (although we’d happily see you more often than that). The best way to show you love your town is to spend your money there!

Sign up to an organic box scheme

 - Again we’ve got this covered. We have a weekly veg box scheme which can provide you with a box full of beautiful, fresh seasonal organic fruit and veg. More information here.

For more information about these pledges visit:

https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/pledge-for-our-planet/food-and-diet/

If you purchase your fruit and veg from us, you are already doing good things for the planet. With the environment now under such enormous pressure from pollution, climate change and the destruction of the natural world, it has never been more important to support organic farming.

If you want to know more about Organic September visit: www.soilassociation.org

Remember, Organic farming systems are good for wildlife, good for the planet and good for your health.

 


18 Jul 2021
Some of Tod Almighty's refills for household detergents, etc.
Some of Tod Almighty's refills for household detergents, etc.

Microplastics and Minimi

This month’s (July and August 2021) ‘Ethical Consumer Magazine’ was looking at refills of household detergents, etc., which of course we sell a lot of in the shop. We stock mostly ‘Miniml’ household detergents as they are environmentally friendly, vegan and kind to skin, and they are a local company with a ‘closed loop’ system whereby they collect the empty barrels and take them back to wash and refill, rather than recycle. 

I love ECM and always read it from cover to cover, as do a lot of our customers. However, this month I was horrified to read that not only was Miniml rated lower in ECM’s charts than expected, but that they said Miniml’s washing up liquid contained microplastics!! You can imagine I was straight on to Miniml to ask them if this was true. Scott from the company assured me that on this occasion ECM had made a mistake, their products DO NOT contain microplastics and ECM had changed their report on their online magazine, to which unfortunately you do need to subscribe to read in full. See https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/home-garden/shopping-guide/ethical-laundry-detergents




I’ve checked and they are right, ECM has changed the part about microplastics to… "As well as potential microplastics, there may be liquid polymers in your cleaners. Liquid polymers are not plastics, but they are also poorly biodegradable and remain for years in our ecosystem with unknown consequences…. Companies that got a best rating for [not using] microplastics and liquid polymers were: Bide, Bio-D, ecoleaf, Friendly Soap, Faith in Nature, Greenscents, Miniml, Planet Detox, SESI, Sodasan and Sonett.”

They also increased Miniml’s rating from 13 to 15, making them joint third best in the market, and above others like Ecoleaf. So, considering they are quite a bit cheaper than a lot of their competitors, and they refill rather than recycle their containers, I think that is much more acceptable. Phew! As we have been asked a few times about it by customers, I thought I would post to the blog to reassure people that Miniml is indeed pretty ethical and environmentally friendly.

 


09 Jul 2021
Some of the plastic free items in the shop
Some of the plastic free items in the shop

Plastic Free July

Imagine! The world has been entirely plastic-free since whale-saviour Tim Minchin gave us all a musical aide memoire to sing before departing for the shops, and we now take the month of July to celebrate that fact and pay tribute to the dolphins who helped us to make it to our enlightened and entirely renewable times. Wouldn’t that be nice? But no, not yet, the world’s arteries remain clogged with the cellophane lids off meal deal pasta salads, and our arteries are becoming increasingly clogged with tiny particles of the same.

Plastic is one of those problems which seem so huge and unsurmountable it’s very difficult to look at them directly as it is just too depressing! But there are lots of new initiatives popping up that combined together can help us as consumers to really have an impact. You probably have heard of things like reusable coffee cups, bamboo toothbrushes, refills of washing up liquid and laundry liquid, wooden washing up brushes, jute shopping bags etc etc. We’ve been selling stuff like this for a while and we have never found so much passion and determination among our customers to use them to reduce their plastic waste. And running the shop I have been repeatedly delighted to find that suppliers are addressing the packaging issue as well, with stock items like little glass bottles of essential oil now arriving in shredded paper packaging rather than bubblewrap, and Optibac probiotics FINALLY arriving in little glass jars rather than plastic tubs (thank you thank you Optibac!). So although there are lots of feelings of despair and helplessness around the state of plastic pollution, especially in our oceans, there are also reasons for hope. And Plastic Free July exists to turn that hope into action – to be, as they put it “part of the solution” and join the many millions of others reducing their plastic waste.




Started in Australia in 2011, the Plastic Free Foundation wants people to commit to new plastic-reduction techniques throughout the month of July. No straws, bringing your own mug to the cafe, refillable porridge oat dispensers – that sort of thing. The movement survived the Coronavirus pandemic and is back this year with the message that even “when things were out of our control, we could have control on something, and it was our own behaviour.” And if nobody asks for or buys the alternative, there will be no alternative. Of course there is a long way to go, but as the Plastic Free July website says: “We don't need one person doing it perfectly, we need millions doing it imperfectly.” For more inspiring stories look on their website, www.plasticfreejuly.org

It’s tempting to not want to open our eyes and look at the state of the world, it’s tempting to feel overburdened and keep the blinkers on. But if seeing what is really happening and feeling the pain and holding the problem in our brains for a moment longer than is comfortable leads to a tiny improvement in our own personal relationship with plastic waste, then we’ve done our bit for the day.

I know how depressing it can be at times, but there is a lot we can do as individuals, while we wait for the powers that be to get their fingers out. Tod Almighty is a “reduce plastic waste” shop (please note, NOT a “zero waste shop, as I don’t think that’s really possible) where we offer a wide range of refills both of wholefoods and detergents that you can fill your own containers with, thereby bypassing packaging altogether. You can refill that washing up liquid bottle dozens of times before it falls apart,and think of the reduction of plastic in the environment just from that one little thing. And it’s cheaper. Drop in and see what else we can offer.

(Thanks to Georges for his input in this)




Everyone loves a washing up brush!
Everyone loves a washing up brush!

 


30 Jun 2021
Oato photo
Oato photo

Oato Floato

Another blog post from our young Georges:

It is suspicious, isn’t it, the recycling logo on a Tetra Pak carton. How does this bizarre assemblage of densely layered paper, plastic and aluminium, once smeared with some beverage, get cleaned and reassembled into a new version of itself? Well, it doesn’t. Tetra Paks are usually disassembled into pulp and additives for roofing tiles in a highly resource and water-intensive process. Better than nothing, but still not great given the quantities of milk substitute required by the tea-drinking public.

The alternative? Disregarding the highly muslin- and drudgery-intensive process of making your own, it seems that the solution has been staring us in the face the whole time: the humble milk float. Not only a pioneer of electric four-wheeled locomotion, milkmen also provided a sustainable system of collection and recycling of the glass bottles containing the milk. Fresh milk to your door, no need for UHT, not a mote of plastic in sight, and fully recyclable; it couldn’t last, it was too perfect for this new world of supermarkets and cars. And yet here are doorstep milk deliveries making a resurgence. Intermittent house arrest, coupled with an anxiety about the ever-expanding market power of supermarkets, seems to have people yearning for a familiar face bearing goods to the door once more.




And vegans aren’t excluded from the fun. Oato is a Lancashire company who take sustainable British grown oats and make into a really good creamy barrista milk that’s great in tea and coffee and is also enhanced with calcium and vitamins. Then they improve upon the inherent planetary benefits of plant-based milk alternatives by having them delivered to your door in a recyclable glass bottle. That they have signed a deal with a variety of regional dairies to have their oat milk delivered alongside cow’s milk by established, local family businesses is an impressively win-win situation. Milk delivery companies gain by future-proofing themselves against the potential shocks of a booming plant-based sector, and Oato gain by, as well as expanding delivery options, normalising their product by offering it alongside more traditional options, thereby enticing potentially reticent customers. Doorstep milk delivery carries with it a degree of cultural romanticism – familiarity for the old and retro-value for the young. For a bit of that normalising magic to rub off on oat milk can only be a good thing for vegan consumers seeking fresher, cheaper, greener, more convenient milk, as well as for cows hoping to give their teats a rest.

Oato-on-a-floato also represents an interesting development for the intergenerational environmental mudslinging which goes on in newspapers and local Facebook groups (potentially face-to-face conversations as well – I wouldn’t know as it’s been quite a while). You know how it goes, millennial blames older generation for the climate crisis, eliciting the rejoinder:

 “Well in my day we didn’t have all this plastic – we gave our glass bottles back to the milkman or took our pop bottles back to the shop for a penny but you can’t do that any more.”

How does the conversation change now that you can do that again? Hopefully it ends in people making a mental note (or phone note, for younger people who have outsourced their notetaking faculties) to get some revolutionary ethical fresh creamy goodness delivered by a harbinger of the old ways.

Who knows, maybe one day we’ll get the shops’ pop bottle recycling infrastructure back, too. It works pretty well in Germany. By the way, we sell Oato in the glass bottles from the chillers in the shop (for £1.25 per pint) – just bring us back your empties for reuse. Or you can get it straight from your own milkman.

 


24 Jun 2021

Solar Foods – food from thin air

‘Food from thin air.’ Sounds very exciting doesn’t it? Like we’re living in some kind of Star Trek wonderland where everything’s powered by glowing blue cubes and public transport is functional. But here it is: Solar Foods’ Soylein. Originally invented by NASA and the Soviets to keep astronauts ticking along up there, and now brought to market by some clever Finns. Makes the whole ‘Spaceship Earth’ thing a whole lot more tangible. And it couldn’t have come at a better time: at the precise moment the mothership's air conditioning systems are being destroyed at record speed by loggers and cattle ranchers, some heroic scientists show up just in time to sever the sobering connection between population growth and land use. It's possible, guys! We can eat spaceman food and rewild the planet! Maybe?

Well, first of all: what is it? Soylein is a microbe found in nature, which can be fed on hydrogen, oxygen, CO2 and a few other chemical additives like ammonia to create a protein-rich, neutral-tasting foodstuff similar to soy. The great thing is that the hydrogen and oxygen particles can be created using electrolysis, leaving us with the power to effectively turn electricity into food. The environmental prospects look rosy. A recent study into the feasibility of creating Soylein using solar power found that its production uses a tenth of the land needed for the soy bean to provide the same amount of protein, and half the land needed by rice paddies to offer the same amount of calories. As these technologies improve, who knows how efficient food production could become?




But will people buy it? The fact that Soylein comes from a microbe rather than a plant might put some people off. Although people have been eating yoghurt cultures for a long time, kimchi and kombucha are gaining in popularity, and anyone who's had a bluish-green smoothie from a supermarket has probably ingested spirulina, so the normalisation of edible bacteria is well underway. And the taste? "Neutral, with a hint of umami." A blank canvas, then. And judging by the success of the Impossible Burger, This Isn't Bacon and Quorn Chicken Nuggets, the technology of turning miscellaneous protein mush into convincing meat substitutes is advancing rapidly and it probably won't be long until they can wrangle Soylein into something delicious and juicy. The only problems I can foretell are the reactionary forces of cultural meat-obsession (I can hear Jeremy Clarkson sneering at consumers of this newfangled space slime already) and the name (surely they could have picked something that doesn't sound like Soylent Green). Oh, and it won't fulfil our vitamin and micronutrient requirements, for which we'll have to keep around those boring old organic vegetable farms. Other than that... "Replicator, make me a ham sandwich!"

Of course, the law of unintended consequences is unavoidable. A lot of this cheap new protein might just be fed to more and more cows, leading to more methane production and hastening the antibiotic apocalypse. But that's where we come in, ethical consumers buying the innovative protein thing before it can find its way into a cow's mouth.

 


08 Jun 2021

Insectageddon

Following on from reading young Georges’ post on organic growing, I found myself embarking on a riff about insects, which if you want you can read, below. Organic growing of course is ‘sustainable’ in that it doesn’t damage or take out more from the natural world than it puts in. So the use of toxic indiscriminate insecticides are banned, for example.

For many years I was an organic veg grower and over that time I developed quite a ‘professional’ interest in insects. I put them in three camps – ones to encourage (ladybirds, bees, lacewings, hover flies), ones to tolerate (all butterflies other than cabbage white, moths, grasshoppers, most beetles, wasps etc) and ones to exterminate as soon as I saw them (aphids, slugs, snails, cabbage white caterpillars, sawfly on gooseberries, fleabeetle on brassicas etc).




That was all very well when I am just head down in my own little veg patch and don’t look up to what’s happening in the wider world. But recently I’ve become aware of the terrifying prospect of the mass extinction of the vast majority of insect life that looks like it is actually happening right here and now, out there in natural world. You may have noticed yourselves that there are far fewer insects around nowadays – rarely see a bee, the clouds of insects that used to be over a flowering meadow reduced to a handful, no insects splatted on your car windscreen at night, – I remember hearing flies ‘murmering’ in trees when I was younger, in their untold thousands.  With no insects to eat, we will watch over the disappearance of robins, blue tits, blackbirds, thrushes, swallows, most of the song birds you hear now in the woods, small mammals such as field mice, dormice, voles, and then following up the food chain to the raptors like kestrel, barn owls, sparrowhawk, all the way up to golden eagle.

And of course so many of the insects, not just bees but very importantly them, act as pollinators for the fruit and vegetables that we grow and eat. Scientists don’t seem very certain what is fuelling this mass extinction, but they suspect pollutants such as insecticides and artificial fertilisers. So, with no food, it won’t only be ‘them’ – insects, birds, animals – that are affected... it will also be ‘us’. I now look at a cloud of midges dancing over water and instead of reaching for the insect repellent I feel glad that the swallows have something to eat after their long journey from Africa. Quite a change!

 


08 Jun 2021
Organic veg
Organic veg

Organic Food – you know it makes sense

I’ve been growing and then selling organic fruit and veg for a long time, and I’m really pleased it’s getting more popular. I hope you enjoy the following blog post, it’s written by a young man called Georges Almond who has a passion for organic growing.

Apples in Southeast Asia are so coated in pesticides, that if you eat the skin you will become very sick. Sometimes it's good to look at extreme examples to better contextualise moderation. The poison may be in the dose, but how carefully are we moderating our dosage of pesticides? The amount of pesticides used has halved in weight since 1990, but land coverage and toxicity have increased considerably. Modern neonicotinoids, bane of bee and human alike, are ten thousand times more toxic than DDT. If it poisons the bugs, it’s probably poisoning us, too.




But with organic veg, you can dine with peace of mind. To earn the organic label, farmers are restricted to spraying their crops with nothing stronger than the likes of citronella and clove oil. In organic agriculture, a greater emphasis is placed on the introduction of predatory insects (ladybirds to hunt aphids) and the tactical placement and rotation of crops in order to reduce the effects of weeds and pesky critters nibbling at your lettuce, whilst accepting that any attempt to completely eradicate them is foolish and unnecessarily destructive.

As a result of being kinder to the ecosystem, organic produce is also kinder to your body. Soil depletion due to over-intensive chemical agriculture means the average non-organic carrot is much less nutritious nowadays than it would have been just decades ago, with significantly reduced levels of magnesium, zinc and vitamin E. Organic farmers rehabilitate their environment by switching out chemical fertilisers for compost (among other measures). Healthier soil means healthier customers.

Much has been made of claims that organic agriculture would, if scaled up to meet the needs of every household in the UK, produce more CO2 than the current system. The current system of chemical-intensive agriculture can, admittedly, produce more food to a more predictable schedule, increasing energy-efficiency and making us less dependent on overseas imports. But this is only one small part of the whole story. The aforementioned study worked off a prediction of a 100% shift to organic, catering to current demand for vegetables. Cultural trends towards eating seasonally available produce and reducing waste are only just beginning, and as organic market share increases, improvements to efficiency are inevitable. Added to this, a highly efficient agricultural system which depletes the nutrients of the soil is only going to lead to soil degradation and desertification faster than a less efficient one. If we are headed over a cliff-edge, why would we want to go faster?

Finally, the cultural and psychological benefits of a strong organic food industry are immeasurable. Chemical-intensive agriculture is borne of a reductive and mechanistic mindset which reduces the relationship of humanity to nature to one of extraction and domination. Organic agriculture is a positive step towards understanding the complexity of nature and working with its already existing systems to create a more harmonious co-existence and ensure the continued thriving of both parties. I think that’s worth supporting.

 


01 Jun 2021
The future of cleaning
The future of cleaning

Welcome to the Future!

By now there are many of us that are really trying our best to reduce our destructive impact on the Earth, through making conscious choices as to what we buy and how we buy it. It is heartwarming to witness so many new companies and businesses with great new ideas for creating products that are aimed at serving our planet instead of taking from it.

Two of these new environmentally orientated companies on the scene are Tru Earth and Spruce, bringing a wonderfully new green and simple solution to household cleaning products...




Here comes the Liquid-less cleaning revolution... we love this, it makes so much sense!

Nearly all household cleaning products, including laundry liquid, are made up of over 90% water... This water is heavy and uses a lot of fuel to transport and distribute around the globe, not to mention it also takes up a lot of space. This is a major and unnecessary environmental problem both for transport pollution and carbon emissions.

Then there is the issue is the harsh chemicals that are used in the majority of cleaning products. Research has shown that breathing in the fumes can contribute towards many major health problems, and of course all the toxins eventually end up going down the drain and out into the environment.

Problem number three is the huge amount of plastic waste that is generated by the industry. You may say; 'but I recycle them so all is well...' No it isn't really, over 90% of all 'recycled' plastic just ends up in landfill or the great oceans of our planet. Nevertheless, please continue to recycle, that 10% is important!

So these are the problems, but the good news is that some new companies are thinking outside the box and coming up with some pretty ingenious solutions!

First we have Spruce, who make reusable aluminium bottles which you fill with water from your own tap and add a little sachet of environmentally friendly cleaner. Mix it up and give it a good shake before you get to spraying your surfaces down, works a treat. For every starter kit purchased, ocean bound plastic waste, equal to twenty-five plastic bottles, is collected by Spruce and removed from our oceans. Over 300 million single-use plastic bottles can be prevented from polluting the planet – if every UK household switched to refillable cleaning. For more details see: https://www.wearespruce.co/pages/how-it-works.

Another of these revolutionary companies is Tru Earth, which provides a clean, green and simple solution to our everyday laundry chores. Tru Earth Laundry Strips are eco friendly and hypoallergenic, making them as gentle on the skin as they are on the environment. The tiny strips contain non toxic, yet super concentrated cleaning detergent that you just pop into your washing machine along with your laundry. The strips dissolve in the water leaving no trace. They come in small slim cardboard packets, taking up hardly any room in the cupboard and in the vehicles that transport them. This means they reduce their carbon footprint by 94% compared with other leading-brand laundry detergents. Yes, 94%! See more at https://www.truearth.uk/

We CAN all make a difference. These are just two ways of many. More to come in future blogs.

We sell both these products in the shop: 

Spruce aluminium bottles £11.99, cleaning sachets £9.99 for pack of 12, so that’s 12 litres worth

Tru Earth Laundry strips £12.99, enough strips for 32 loads of washing

We also sell Miniml laundry liquid refill for £3.30/litre

We CAN all make a difference. These are just two ways of many. More to come in future blogs.

 


11 May 2021

Fair Trade and rainbows

We try to get in as much Fair Trade stock as we can in the shop, so we have quite a lot of the teas, coffees and chocolate that are fairly traded. Plus a few other things like pineapple chunks, rubber gloves and peanut butter. What is Fair Trade? Well, as the Fair Trade Foundation says... "Fairtrade means fairer pay and more power in the hands of farmers, so that they can create change for us all, from investing in climate friendly farming techniques and clean water for their community, to nurturing women leaders and making sure children get an education. When you choose Fairtrade, you’re choosing the world you want to see."

It’s the classic thing of the pound in your pocket having the potential to profoundly affect people’s lives, as well as the environment. It’s also 'fair' in that you are paying the price you should for a sustainable product, rather than paying less than it is worth and kicking the cost of the environmental implications down the road for future generations. So, we think it is a JOLLY GOOD THING and there should be more of it all the time there is a need for it. Which there certainly is at the moment, unfortunately.




Which is why I was tempted to try some rather nice 'non food' items of stock for a change. Shared Earth is a company that is dedicated to fair trade and with a mission to 'To improve the livelihoods of disadvantaged people in developing countries, benefiting local community projects and keeping alive traditional skills that would otherwise be lost.' (read more about them here: https://www.sharedearth.co.uk/). And they do a lot of rainbow stuff, and I have been obsessed with rainbows for years and finally everybody else seems to be joining me in my little multi-coloured arching happy space!

So I’ve taken the plunge and now you can buy all sorts of stuff, from rainbow teapots to jute shopping bags to rag rugs, plus loads of other new stock like incense sticks, essential oil defusers, glass suncatchers, hand carved wooden trivets and coasters, colourful mosaic mirrors, and loads more (see elsewhere on this website) – all made from sustainable or recycled materials and all ideal for a useful and cheering present either to yourself or for some other lucky person.

We all need to keep cheerful!

 


09 May 2021
Clare, Graham, Krista and Sally (waving) outside the new shop.
Clare, Graham, Krista and Sally (waving) outside the new shop.

Welcome to the Tod Almighty blog!

Hi there, and welcome to Tod Almighty's new blog! We are delighted to have our own blog at last and many thanks to my brother John Hayes of Webmaker.UK for doing such a fantastic job with setting it up. Here we're hoping to give our customers a bit more background information about our shop, our ethics, the stories behind our suppliers and stock, and about how you can reduce your plastic waste and your impact on the environment. As well as other things, like recipes etc.

Let me introduce ourselves. I'm Sally – the one with grey hair in the photo above, and I've been involved in sustainability and organic food, both as a grower,a producer, a parent and a shopkeeper for rather a long time. I work with some fantastic people in the shop – Clare, Graham, Krista, Rowan, Sayaka, and the other Clair – and in fact we are just recruiting, so if you are looking for work you could get in touch.




Our aim in the shop is to enable our customers to reduce their plastic waste by buying refills, eat a healthy vegan diet with as many organic choices as possible, to support other local businesses, and to behave responsibility and respectfully to the earth, its animals, its people and the environment. We're also keen to do our bit towards tackling climate change, which will probably be the biggest challenge we have ever had to deal with in our history. Phew!

But here on the blog we aim to be interesting – hopefully – and to have some fun!

Lots of refill cannisters for customers to fill their own containers
Lots of refill cannisters for customers to fill their own containers

We also bag-up the bulk wholefoods into compostable cellophane bags
We also bag-up the bulk wholefoods into compostable cellophane bags
 


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