"Whenever we go to war with a country, we bring back the food," says Crisantos Hajibrahim, a retired lance corporal, in a Wall Street Journal article by Tamara Audi (3/15/10). So much so that Crisantos and his wife, Denise Hazime, are now running "Dede Med's Shawarma House -- the first Arabic food stand -- " at Camp Pendleton, California. The idea was Denise's, and the couple are enjoying a "lucrative market" on the base, "which has a daytime population of 60,000 hungry Marines and civilians."

Lane Jones, the communications director, explains: "They're deploying to that part of the world and they're developing a taste for that kind of product." Indeed, "more than two million military service members have been deployed to the Middle East" since 2001. "... Those sent to villages and neighborhoods quickly learn about lamb, flat bread and the ubiquitous chickpea ... shared meals are often a key part of forming bonds and winning trust."

When Denise contacted the base about an Arabic food stand she already had an online following, at Dede's Mediterranean Kitchen featuring recipes and cooking videos (link). She admits to some trepidation opening her stand after a Muslim pyschiatrist "allegedly killed 12 in a shooting rampage" at Fort Hood in Texas. However, as Denise notes, "This is not about war. This is not about politics. This is about shawarma ... And falafel." Alexander Harris, back from Afghanistan, agrees. "I love the shawarma," he says. "I'm glad we finally have it here," adding, "Now this is exciting."

"It brings us back to Guatamala," says Eugenia Flores, explaining the appeal of Pollo Campero, reports Michael Arndt in Bloomberg Businessweek (3/22/10). Pollo Campero, which in English means Country Chicken, is "the fried chicken chain that's the McDonald's of Guatamala and making a dent in the U.S. fast-food market, with 53 stores in 15 states since its 2002 arrival." Pollo Campero already has a total of "325 restaurants in 13 countries from Equador and Mexico to Spain, Bahrain, India and China" and has a global goal of "1,750 franchises over the next decade."

This would include about 500 locations in the U.S. alone, "expanding beyond its Spanish-speaking base" across America. This fall, a Pollo Campero "will replace a McDonald's in Walt Disney World's entertainment district near Orlando. The company is also testing a restaurant inside a Walmart store in Bentonville, Ark." While expat Guatamalans no doubt appreciate the "fried plantains and milky horchata drinks," Pollo Campero is also attracting the "crossover market" with "dishes such as grilled chicken and mashed potatoes."

Pollo Campero began in 1971 as "an afterthought" by founder Juan Bautista Gutierrez, "as an outlet for his poultry farms," and is now part of a $2.2 billion family conglomerate that also includes lumber, construction and hydroelectric power. The restaurants "feature drive-through windows and brightly colored booths," and boast "bigger-than-average checks in the U.S. because a high percentage of its customers are families ... A 12-piece chicken combo" runs $21.99," which is "more than four foot-long sandwiches at Subway ... Per-unit sales come to $1.7 million a year, nearly double KFC's $950,000," according to Technomic.

"We have a special obligation to the decaf drinker," says Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, in a New York Times piece by Kim Severson (3/10/10). "Those guys are true believers," he continues. "They're not drinking coffee because they need to wake up. They're only drinking coffee because they like the taste." The problem, of course, is that most decaf coffee doesn't taste very good. "I think there was and still is an idea in the trade that it's just decaf, so use what you can get away with," says Doug Welsh of Peet's Coffee & Tea.

It's true that most of the time, the best beans are saved for regular coffee. It's also a fact that the decaffeination process, which can involve methylene chloride or soaking the beans in water, tends to compromise flavor. Fortunately, there's now "a new breed of boutique roasters who focus extraordinary levels of attention on finding good beans" and "changing the art of decaf." Intelligentsia says its decaf La Tortuga "remains sturdy through the captivating finish of dried figs and caramel," for instance.

Sterling Mace, a decaffer at Blue Bottle in San Francisco, meanwhile "likes that the people behind the counter apply the same measured focus to her decaf Americano as they do to every other drink they make." The National Coffee Association says about 10 percent of daily coffee drinkers drink decaf, however "niche roasters say that decaf consumption is higher among their customers." Counter Culture, based in Durham, N.C., says about 18 percent of its sales are for decaf, and Jardiniere, a San Francisco restaurant, puts decaf sales at 33 percent.

James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee doesn't care how long it takes -- he wants to make sure his customers enjoy the best possible cup of coffee, as reported by Oliver Strand in the New York Times (3/3/10). He must really mean it, given his approach to making iced coffee, which takes 12 hours. For this, James uses a Japanese slow-drip device, standing three-feet tall and consisting of "a network of glass globes and adjustable nozzles that mete out liquid at 88 drops a minute."

As James explains: "You precariously take that glass sphere, fill it with cold filtered water, then you stand on a stepstool and nervously and quickly invert it over the reservoir." He adds: "It's theatrical ... It's incredible tasting, too. It wouldn't be worth the show and the hassle if it didn't taste great." His customers think it's worth the trouble; James has had a devoted -- and patient -- following since 2003, when he first started selling coffee from a puschart in San Francisco.

James now has four Blue Bottle coffee bars "and a small fleet of pushcarts" in San Francisco as well as a roaster and coffee bar in Oakland. He just expanded into Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at 160 Berry Street, where he's making 'nel drip' coffee using Japanese flannel filters (video)" James says he'd like his coffee bar to recall San Francisco, but not too much. "The thing about coffee," he says, "is that coffee is local. I'm not just showing up in New York. I'm showing up on Berry Street."

"... You find that there's nothing like picking rocks out of fields to bring people together," says Rob Jones in a New York Times piece by Christine Muhlke (2/28/10). Rob is founder of the Crop Mob, a merry band of "pop-up farmers" who band together to help "small, sustainable farms" do whatever needs to be done: "mulching, building greenhouses and pulling rocks out of fields." So far the Crop Mob has helped a total of 21 farms in the Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham area in North Carolina, donating a total of about 2,000 hours.

The idea originated "during a meeting about issues facing young farmers, during which an intern declared that better relationships are built working side by side than by sitting around a table. So one day, 19 people went to Piedmont Biofarm and harvested, sorted, and boxed 1,600 pounds of sweet potatoes in two and a half hours. A year later, the Crop Mob e-mail list has nearly 400 subscribers and the farm fests draw 40 to 50 volunteers." Most of the volunteer farmers are young and don't have farms of their own, but the events help give them an inside track on "internships, learn about affordable land and find potential dates."

Trace Ramsey, a farmer who has benefitted from the Crop Mob, sees an explosion of interest in farming among young people. "People are interested in authentic work," he says. "I think they're tired of what they've been told they should accomplish in their lives and they're starting to realize that it's not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective." For the farmers, it solves a big problem, too -- not only in terms of the free labor, but also the social aspects. Rob Jones thinks the idea could spread to gardening, even to cities, since "anywhere there's dirt, a community can grow."

"A fruit that tastes like dirt is suddenly a sweet money maker in Brazil," reports Seth Kugel in the New York Times (2/24/10). We're talking about acai, long a dietary staple of poor, rural Brazilians, and now "riding the wave of the antioxidant craze and rain-forest chic." Demand for acai, which grow on palm trees and look like great, big blueberries, is way up in recent years. Traditionally, it is served as porridge, but now it is finding its way into everything from Snapple beverages to pizza crusts and even beauty products. Surfers use it in smoothies, for an energy boost.

Leticia Galvao, a Brazilian, finds this funny, since acai tends to make her sleepy. "Generally, when you have acai here, you take a nap," she says. Maybe it depends how much sugar you add -- locals, especially older, more rural folks, like their acai straight up, which is said to "taste like dirt. Making matters worse, the manioc flour that's often mixed in to thicken it has the consistency of sand." But acai's growing popularity has been a real boon, economically, for Brazil's acai growers. "Two or three years ago, we had a lot of trouble selling the product," says Orisvaldo Ferreira de Souza, an acai farmer.

That's all changed: "Just yesterday, six buyers came by," he says. "We sold 10 baskets each to two of them." Orisvaldo can now afford to "buy meat and chicken in town," put a motor on his boat and acquire a television set. Such success has had a negative effect, however, on urban poor families, for whom acai is "a valuable source of nutrition." Prices have gone up, although for now, acai consumption among the poor hasn't slowed; they simply thin it down a bit. "Fifteen years ago, it was like beans for us," says Joao Manuel. "Now it's more expensive than beans. We eat it just the same; it's only now that we feel it in our wallets."

Theo Sims, "a British-born neo-conceptualist," hopes to promote "cross-cultural conversations" at a "mock-up of a Belfast pub," reports Charles McGrath in the New York Times (2/22/10). The pub, which Theo calls the Candahar, is built in a 12 x 20-foot plywood box, and is located "on the third floor of the Playwrights Theater Center on Granville Island," in Vancouver. In other words, it's less a pub than performance art, with its run timed to coincide with the Oympic Games.

Theo built "the whole thing himself, using a router and drill, and it's pretty authentic looking (image). There are beer taps, a brass rail, a bench balanced on beer kegs and reproductions of the buzzers once used to alert the barman that a customer will be needing a fresh pint shortly." It's modeled on a now-defunct pub, called the Blackthorn. The pub's name, Candahar, "comes from a street in Belfast that used to be the headquarters of a school of Irish artists."

Working the pub are brothers Chris and Conor Roddy, "authentic Irish publicans wearing fedoras and thick Irish sweaters." Theo imported them himself. Patrons can get local beer using special tickets, not real money, since "the Candahar is not a bar but a theater space." As Conor explains, "This gives people an opportunity to have a slight respite from all the Olympic fever, and it has really brought the community together." When the Olympics end, Theo says he might try to sell it, but his dream is to "take it down, make a bonfire and burn it."

"Napa's winemakers are in the throes of a classic market disruption," reports Katrina Heron in the New York Times (2/17/10). Last year, according to Nielsen, "sales of wines priced $25 and above dropped 30 percent nationwide." Ivo Jeramaz, a vice president at Grgich Hills Estate, confirms that sales at his winery are down by about a third. The situation is so dire that at least one vineyard has taken to selling surplus grapes at a roadside stand, and others talk about just "skipping a vintage, which would amount to wiping a year off the calendar."

Ivo's boss, 87-year-old Mike Grgich, is so nervous that he's abandoned his lifelong distrust of technology. "Get me Facebook and Twitter!" he recently commanded his staff, perhaps hoping to bottle his old wine in new media. Vintners increasingly are embracing a strategy known as "retail room," a combination of "the winery tasting room, the now-ubiquitous wine club, and, most of all, nascent e-commerce."

Stuart and Charles Smith, of Smith-Madrone Vineyards, have been on this track for some time, tending "to their customer list with the same care they lavish on their wines." Stuart says his winery "would be in very tough shape if it wasn't for our on-site and internet sales." Dario Sattui of V. Sattui meanwhile has built its wine club into "40,000 active members" and "35 percent of his business is done via mail order or on the internet, with the balance handled on-site." But even Dario admits, "Making wine -- that's the easy part. It's selling it that's hard."

Pierre Gilissen grew up in Belgium, makes chocolates in Connecticut, and won't ship his goodies anywhere, reports Jan Ellen Spiegel in the New York Times (2/14/10). Pierre's chocolates, available only at Belgique Patisserie & Chocolatier in Kent, Connecticut, sell for $65 a pound. Belgique produces just 18,000 pounds of chocolates a year. For this, customers can expect perfection: "I'm not going to do it if I can't do it right," says Pierre. "People think you just buy a block of chocolate; you melt it; you dip the strawberry in it. Not quite, it's a little bit tricky."

He demonstrates this while making chocolate shells, rejecting and remelting a batch that he deems too thick. He won't ship because "his molded, three-step chocolates are traditional Belgian pralines filled with classic gianduja, a hazelnut ganache, and other mainly chocolate mixtures that must be refrigerated because of the large amount of cream they contain." His artisanal enterprise is just one of at least nine chocolatiers that have popped up in Connecticut over the past dozen years.

Others include Knipschildt Chocolatier of Norwalk, which offers both single-estate and single-country chocolates. Knipschildt also mixes "chocolates with spices, herbs and other savory flavorings, especially chiles and sea salts." Interest in locally produced chocolates has grown with chocolate's "emergence as something just short of health food." Despite its calories and fat, high-cocoa percentage chocolate "contains flavonoids that appear to have several health benefits." Sales of white chocolate, meanwhile, have plummeted.

"There's alternate ways to grow food," says Rob Torcellini, whose alternative-of-choice is known as aquaponics, reports Michael Tortorello in the New York Times (2/18/10). Aquaponics is a closed-loop system, in which water and waste from a fish tank is used to hydrate and fertilize plants planted in gravel. The gravel filters the water, which is then returned to the tanks. You not only get fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the winter, but you can also eat the fish, usually tilapia, if you want. Rob built his aquaponics rig in a greenhouse in Connecticut, and he's cultivating bumper crops.

"We actually keep a tally of how many cherry tomatoes we grew ... And from one plant it was 347." He says three cucumber plants yielded 175 cukes, too. "I don't want to push it down people's throats," says Rob, "but if someone's interested, I'd like to show them how you can do this with cheap parts and a little bit of Yankee ingenuity." If you're not quite as handy as Rob, there are kits, like Farm in a Box, that provide everything you'd need. There's also a website, Backyard Aquaponics, where growing numbers of enthusiasts commune.

But be forewarned: Aquaponics can be addictive, says Sylvia Bernstien, who posts aquaponics videos on YouTube (link) and has a blog. She says that "people start with this little 100-gallon backyard system ... Next thing, they'll say, the tilapia were really cool, but I want to grow trout." For now, estimates are that "there may be 200 to 1,200 aquaponic set-ups in American homes and yards, and perhaps another 1,000 bubbling away in school science classrooms." Most enthusiasts are tinkerers, gardeners, gadget-freaks and greenies. But some see a future in which apartment-aquaponics produce fresh veggies and all the tilapia you can eat.