🌍 Change Your Habits
PLUS New food systems, a northern pasta fix, and some musical mushrooms
Welcome to BRiMM, the collective, journal and planet-positive shop here to help you live a lower-impact life, without life feeling less.
BRiMM News Desk
This week - drumroll please - a preview of our website is now live! All of a sudden, it’s here, and we’re so proud. Ahead of a broader launch later this week we’re inviting you all in early to check it out. Please dive in and take a look around (but maybe read this newsletter first, there’s another link at the bottom) and let us know what you think - we’d love to hear.
Our BRiMM Journal publishes a powerful new essay from environmental expert Mark Shayler: How A New Food System Can Heal Us and The Planet (more on this below).
Now booking: our first film screening. Woody Harrelson and the team behind Kiss the Ground are back - and this time they’re going to Congress. Common Ground is their excellent follow up, and BRiMM are screening it at a very lovely central London location accompanied by a panel of founders of brands we’re working with. All members invited to sign up here.
This week’s theme is… Change Your Habits
The power of tiny habits, atomic habits, habit stacking - you can’t move these days for advice about how to organise your life. But as the demise of our modern systems and economies proves, whether that’s in food or fashion, attention or money, it’s time to change the way we do things. Wholesale. Radical change is hard, but as many of these new habit theories point out, big changes can come from starting small. Tried doing 10 squats every time you brush your teeth? That’s 20 squats a day. Over the course of a year. That’s some great thighs.
A quick survey of the BRiMM collective shows we’re all at it. Whether you’re a member of the 5am club, practising the Five Tibetans, zoning in to some meditative time, or incentivising a kitchen clean up with a cup of tea, we’ve all got hacks for a better routine - and they work.
According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviours on any given day. As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, puts it: “Your life today is essentially the sum of your habits. How in shape or out of shape you are? A result of your habits. How happy or unhappy you are? A result of your habits. How successful or unsuccessful you are? A result of your habits.”
“Everything from procrastination and productivity to strength and nutrition starts with better habits,” says Clear. So let’s apply that to systems - as our beauty ed Sam says, if we all finished the bottle before buying a new product, that would save so much waste. (Admit it: how many open bottles do you have in your bathroom?).
There’s a refrain in sustainability circles that goes something like this: “We don’t need a handful of people living a low impact life perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” It begins with what you put on your body and what you put in your body. “If we can fix food, we can fix the planet,” Wildfarmed’s Andy Cato tells Mark Shayler in our Journal piece this week. What if we all followed Tim Spector’s habit hack, to eat 30 different plants a week? Not only would our guts thrive (according to Spector), but so would the planet: as countless peer reviewed studies prove. This study in Nature Food found the environmental footprint of a vegan was around one-third lower than that of a meat-eater. And that what people eat, as opposed to where or how it was produced, is often far more impactful. So berries from Spain can be a better option than a couple of rashers of British bacon. “That is the spark of a revolution starting, one mouthful at a time,” says Mark.
As for the products you use to clean your home and your body - many contain toxic ingredients and microplastics that not only harm sea life, but may cause allergies, disrupt hormones and act as pre-cursors to degenerative disease. Check Fairy washing up liquid next time you’re in the supermarket: their bottle label clearly states: “harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects”. Finish dishwasher tablets contain plastic-binding agents that don’t readily break down in the environment. This is what coats your everyday crockery and cutlery and is going into your body. It’s easy to hack the system: just switch your consumer choices to brands that take responsibility for their effect on the environment.
The BRiMM Reset Boxes are there to give you some inspiration, but we can promise, once you start stacking those habits, you’ll never look back.
Team up, tune in and let’s turn the tide,
BRiMM x
BRiMM Journal
Tweaking a handful of daily diet and drink choices is the most impactful thing we can do to improve our health and that of our planet, argues Mark Shayler, the author, environmental expert and founder of innovation agency Ape, (a consultancy that saves its clients over $200 million and a shed-load of carbon every year). In this exclusive essay for BRiMM, How A New Food System Can Heal Us and The Planet, Mark explains why our food systems are responsible for a third of global carbon emissions. Problem? No: it’s an opportunity, says Mark: “Our forks are mighty tools.” Here’s four habits to get you going:
Eat more plants and a greater variety.
Support “better” food producers.
Cook more, waste less.
Grow something.
📢 RESET YOUR PANTRY 📢
Ready to change your food habits? Then start here. Whether you’re a seasoned flexitarian or just starting to rethink your cupboard staples, our Pantry Essentials Reset Box is a treasure trove of inspiring swaps that are better for your health and that of the planet. Curated by BRiMM’s Christabel (formerly of House of Fraser, Farmdrop and Oddbox), this box is a handpicked edit of founder-led, flavour-first products that offer more than just great taste. Each item champions regenerative agriculture, circular packaging or waste-fighting brilliance.
The BRiMM Life Questionnaire
This week it’s the turn of Vanessa Marx, Head Chef at Richmond’s Bingham Riverhouse, the riverside foodie mecca with rooms (“Highly recommended”, Ed). Leading a new generation of visionary female chefs, we caught up with Vanessa in between meals for her low impact life hacks.
Latest reset?
Juicing and then using the leftover pulp to bake carrot banana loaf or crackers.
All time top second hand find?
A tweed jacket that belonged to my mum – circa 1980, fits me like it was made for me.
Most joyful weekend moment?
A Sunday sunset Kundalini practice to seal the week
Song that lights you up?
Coming Home by Jeremy Loops & Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It reminds me of home and my heritage – South Africa
Causes you give to every month?
Local food banks
Message for the collective?
Do one small sustainable step at a time, it will become a habit and we will all contribute to the larger change. Nothing is too small, something is better than nothing. Don’t be afraid of not getting it perfect – just go for it.
Fancy doing our BRiMM Life Questionnaire yourself? Get in touch
FROM THE COLLECTIVE
Becky is loving musical mushrooms: engineers have ”taught” mushrooms to play musical instruments
Tiff says follow Louis Elton’s Nation of Artisans project: Louis is attempting to have an entire outfit of clothes sourced and made from within the UK.
Matt’s loving Earth FC. If you’re getting in the mood for the Euros, start here
We love to hear what our collective is finding. Share your links with here
BRIMM LINKS
A MODEL OF BEHAVIOUR
This one’s not about getting your child off the naughty step, it’s more for your inner child. Dr BJ Fogg founded the Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford University, and is the author of the bestselling Tiny Habits. The Fogg Behaviour Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt. What’s more he does free calls - if you have a product you think will change behaviour, Dr Fogg will give you a free 15 minutes.
JOIN THE ONE PERCENT
The one percent rule looks at why few people get the most rewards. As Oxfam points out each year at Davos, the richest 1 percent have earned nearly two-thirds of all new wealth since 2020, almost twice as much as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. James Clear, (Atomic Habits), explains this effect as “accumulative advantage,” or “winner takes all.” How? Habits of course. “Small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated over time,” says Clear. Just follow his advice to enter the trillionaire class.
FOLLOW THE PROCESS
If you’ve never heard of the Hoffman Process, it is, according to attendees, like “ten years of therapy in ten days”. No one is allowed to say too much about it, but let’s just say it takes you back to your childhood to reset the habitual ways of thinking that don’t serve you. The retreats often take place in beautiful countryside locations. Curious? Book yourself a free consultation.
→ BOOK HERE
POLL
THE GREEN PASTA FIX
Enjoying the watercress season? Us too. Our friends at Northern Pasta Co suggest lacing it through their Radiatori salad with some charred pepper, then break a deep fried, oozy goats cheese over the top. Yum.
THE SUMMER ONE
This is the July playlist you never knew you needed, says Matt. We’ve been tapping away all week to it: three hours of pure joy. Thank you Matt! For more of his joyous playlists mosey over here.
The carbon footprint of an email depends what device you use to open it, but sending you this one used about 3.5g of carbon.
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