The crew behind a campaign called Eat Your Sidewalk has brought an entirely new meaning to the word local. Forget the vast Agricultural Industrial Complex. Eat Your Sidewalk is about finding breakfast, lunch, dinner in your own front yard. Literally. The project, which failed to reach its $23,000 Kickstarter goal, is nonetheless in the midst of a seven-day challenge to get at least some of the people in Sherbrooke Quebec to subsist for an entire week on what they can find right under their feet.

Watch the Kickstarter video to get a full sense of the Eat Your Sidewalk philosophy, but here’s a snippet.

When you begin to eat what’s under your feet, you and your environment share the same history and the same future. When we eat this dandelion, we share what’s happened to it.

And I liked this.

So often we talk about local but we skip over our actual place to get to the parts of our environment we more easily recognize because they are more like products or have been defined for us as important. But this means we are not addressing our actual environment fully. How do we do this? Begin with where you are — your sidewalks, yards, neighborhoods, and the systems that they are part of — and pay attention to everything. When this really happens a place comes alive.

The blog is pretty charming too.

Our bartering was limited. Cole bartered removing some poison ivy for a bottle of wine. We were quite content with this. Needing little else.

Not sure how much sustenance I’d get from my little, ahem, patch, but thanks to a story I heard on WNYC the other day, I was able to identify a burdock plant growing on my lawn. 

— Debbie Galant