After one week filled with delicious recipes, hot gardening tips and helpful biking notes, our first Eat Local: food and sustainability challenge is over.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the challenge and contributed on babble, our Facebook groups, twitter, instagram and of course at home. We feel the challenge was a great success much in part to both the participants and all those people and organizations who contributed informative content to rabble.

For those who happened to miss some great posts or want to extend the challenge beyond this week, please find below our roundup of all the exciting Eat Local content!

The first day of rabble's Eat Local! food and sustainability challenge found me on my back step with a hammer, clumsily smashing open black walnuts collected last fall from a tree in Ottawa's Dominion arboretum and then forgotten in my freezer.

It's a shame I didn't have a nutcracker, and even more of a shame that I was working on this task alone, because I believe that the best part of this last decade's upsurge of interest in local food is its potential break us out of individualist mode and bring us together with our neighbours. A turn towards local food can re-connect us not only to the seasons, soils and plants of our home region, but also to each other.

Our small one-bedroom apartment has a lot of character on the inside, but outside, it’s little more than a large brick rectangle on a tiny piece of land. With the exception of a few stray daffodils that poke through the soil every spring, our garden space is nil.

The student (and those of us on a student budget) diet is famously known for the staples of Kraft Dinner, ramen noodles and bags of frozen perogies that only cost a few bucks.

But imagine your mac and cheese spiced up with some fresh hot pepper or a nice kale salad to complement your ramen. Heck, how about just some nice herbs to liven up your frozen food? It’s entirely easy and possible to grow these fresh foods no matter how little space you have.

As you have probably gathered by now, eating local is a fabulous way to practice sustainable and nutritious solutions to the epidemic of corporate and industrialized food systems. Highly processed and transported foods, owned by giant multinational corporations, come at the expense of our bodies, labour, human rights, the air we breathe, and so much more. How could anyone living in this beautiful Coast Salish Territory not include local foods with their every meal?

Last week our How To lesson was about canning, and this week we've also posted some rad reviews of food-related books: Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto and Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.

Cycling is a great way to get around. It’s healthy, efficient, fun and sustainable. As such I’m always perplexed when people in North America find every excuse to avoid utilitarian cycling.

It’s not necessarily that people here are inherently lazy; in fact in many cases it’s on the contrary -- many of these people who avoid cycling spend hours in the gym several times a week.

I am baffled as to why people would be willing to pay a monthly fee to sit on an exercise bicycle in the gym when they could instead be cycling outdoors for their daily commute or for running errands.

1. "It's like comparing apples and oranges."

The difference between apples and oranges used to be so stark that to compare them would have been, well, fruitless. But thanks to the triumphs of agriculture and biotechnology, soon we’ll have apples that are oranges. No word yet on whether they’ll keep the doctor away. 

Update: It’s like comparing apples to genetically modified apples.

2. "The early bird gets the worm."

If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

The results, published in a new report, were as nauseating as a grub-infested apple:

I love beer.

And not in the "I'm going to drink a case of Canadian by myself" way. I'm one of those drinkers who is always bothering the bartender about what they have on draft and is aghast when there's nothing micro-brewed available.

I've now lived in two cities that have opened micro-breweries since I've moved there, something I attribute to divine intervention ("And the Lord cameth and delivered us from crappy booze"). While living in Windsor, all that stood between me and the Walkerville Brewery was a 20-minute bike ride.