Editor’s note: This is your weekly installment of images from Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton’s Lexicon of Sustainability. We’ll be running one image every Friday this winter, so stay tuned. If you have your own sustainability terms, you can add them yourself to the Lexicon of Sustainability.

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Real Time Farms is a "crowd-sourced online food guide" that tells you exactly where the meal on your plate came from.

As crazy as it sounds, our vision is to collectively document the whole food system.

In Mozambique, home brewing is big -- not because the country is full of mustachioed, fixie-riding expats from Portlandia, but just because it’s less expensive. So when brewing giant SABMiller wanted to figure out how to sell beer to people who are already making their own, they had to do it on the cheap, reports Marc Gunther at GreenBiz. Using local ingredients and less energy turned out to be key to keeping prices competitive with the corner moonshine still.

The result is Impala, a beer made from cassava, the starchy root endemic to Africa.

Oh, deer. (Photo by QUOI Media Group.) I am not a hunter. I don't (and will not) own a gun and, though I've toyed with the idea of bow hunting in the past, my aim really stinks. Even so, the deer population where I live does need to be thinned, since we've taken their natural predators away. And I sure do appreciate a good venison steak. Here in Nebraska does are not in short supply -- in fact, many hunters are after a trophy buck and the state has to push hunters to shoot their female counterparts. Having many more …

Photo: Elisabeth Kwak-HefferanFarm to table? Please, so 2009. Forest to table is where it's at right now. And while foraging one's own nettles, berries, or chestnuts (or paying top dollar for them at hip restaurants) has both foodies and greenies all in a tizzy these days, no other gathering activity has quite the cachet of mushroom hunting. Hey, what's not to admire when your commodity of choice is delicious, valuable, tough to find, and, in the hands of amateurs, may cause profuse vomiting? Mushroom foraging, like all foraging, is by no means new. An elite and secretive society has existed …

Maude Bauschard, outside her local food market in St. Louis. Maude Bauschard sells local and sustainably produced groceries and runs a weekly community-supported agriculture (CSA) box from a small store she calls Maude's Market. This wouldn't sound like much if she were living in a city on one of the coasts, but Bauschard lives in St. Louis, Mo., or what she calls "the heart of Monsanto country." Literally: The city is home to the world headquarters of Monsanto, one of the world's leading producers of both herbicide and genetically engineered (GE) seeds. "So any sort of action -- even just …

Dust off your old sash, because you could be eligible for the Girl Scout "locavore" merit badge. (It means you only eat the cookies that your neighbor's kid sells, right?) Here's how you earn your locavore badge: Explore the benefits and challenges of going local Find your local food sources Cook a simple dish showcasing local ingredients Make a recipe with local ingredients Try a local cooking challenge SF Weekly has a little more detail on what each step entails: The girls start out slowly, first interviewing a local cook or a grocery store manager about the food system, and …

"I have a theory, and I don't think you're gonna like it." Justin was seated across from me at a communal table in a "Secret Restaurant." We had met not half an hour before, but were now deep in discussion about what chickens should eat to produce the best-tasting eggs -- an obsession of mine recently. "I think they're carnivores," my new friend finally revealed, with a devilish twinkle in his eyes. I was pretty positive he was wrong. I've been a backyard egg farmer for just a few months now, and my eggs are good, but I'm going for …

Intentional community, draft horses, and farmstead cheese. If it sounds like we're in Vermont, that's because we are! This short film takes place at Cobb Hill, a cohousing and farming community, where residents work together and share resources to create what they call the "homebase food system." We got to watch them make cheese, run their CSA, and we shared our fantastic corn chowder recipe with the community.

This shopping cart attachment lets you compare the food miles on your purchases in a way that's quick, easy to interpret, and less complicated than the self-checkout. That is cool as hell! Also, this demonstration video, which was made for a conference, is a complete hoot. (I am a sucker for a British accent, though.)