I have never felt as much a part of a close-knit community as I did in university. On the very first day, three of us (out of five) in what you might I suppose call a dorm discovered an instant friendship. By the cancelled 50^th reunion in 2020, one of us was no longer alive to attend. In between, and still now, there was just something very special that started back then.

UN-sanctioned international years of this, that and the other have been with us since 1959 and World Refugee Year. In 2004, we were fed the first direct food year with the international year of rice, and since then we’re had potatoes, quinoa, pulses, fruits and vegetables and millets. Food-adjacent years have included biodiversity, family farming, soils, plant health, and artisanal fisheries and aquaculture. Next year promises camelids, with rangelands and pastoralists due in 2026.

Bad news, Optimists. Latest data from USDA Agricultural Research Service shows a steep drop in agricultural output growth in 2011–2021. That despite an increase in land converted to agriculture.

Hard times are coming, we just can’t be sure about when.

The available figures on honey adulteration are pretty alarming: 46% of samples in the EU, 100% of honey exported from the UK, more than a quarter of Australian samples “of questionable authenticity”. However, as Matt Phillpott pointed out in a recent episode of Eat This Podcast, one of the great difficulties honey poses is that it is so variable. All of the many “natural” components of honey vary from batch to batch, hive to hive, season to season, so that while a specific “unnatural” chemical might unambiguously signal adulteration, other kinds of evidence are a lot less cut and dried.

Two geohashing locations within cycling distance, on Saturday and today. My cup runneth over.

The first was very, very close to home, about 1.5km as the crow flies. It was, alas, in the middle of the Tiber, so I was prevented from reaching the location by Mother Nature. But I'm counting it a wi...