Play Beer!

Coors Brewing Co. has announced that it plans to build the world’s first brewery in a ballpark. As of opening day next year, it expects to be brewing and selling a spectrum of specialty beers from ale to stout in the SandLot Brewery at Coors Field, the Golden, Colo., home of the Colorado Rockies baseball team.

Food Growth

The pizza came to America and begat the deep-dish pizza. The margarita cocktail came to America and turned into the bathtub margarita. Now Tufts University Diet & Nutrition Letter reports that the bagel has been growing too. Once two ounces was the standard size, but a lot of them are around three ounces these days, and some from Dunkin’ Donuts weighed in at 4.2 ounces.

So What’s for “Breadfast�?

India is a major milk-producing and grain-consuming country. What American cereal companies are trying to figure out is why only 3.2% of Indian households in big cities (forget about the little villages) eat American-style breakfast cereal. Most breakfast on one or another kind of bread.

Give Salad a Chance

Blessed by Adnan Abu Odeh, Jordan’s permanent representative to the United Nations, and Colette Avital, Israeli consul general in New York, on Dec. 8 an outfit named PeaceWorks introduced Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmumken’s World Famous, a line of Mediterranean condiments (sun-dried tomatoes, stuffed olives, olive oil, pesto and spread/sauces based on tomatoes and green olives). Founder Daniel Lubetzky believes such projects (Moshe/Ali has both Arab and Jewish partners) can create economic interdependency and thus ethnic peace in all troubled regions. Next from PeaceWorks: “Natural Dead Sea skin and hair products� (they may want to come up with a different name).

The Pour-Me State

The Missouri wine industry reports its highest sales since Prohibition, the state’s 34 wineries having sold nearly 254,000 gallons between July ’93 and June ’94. (The biggest year ever for Missouri wine was 1904, though: 3 million gallons.) Next year’s annual Midwest Regional Grape and Wine Conference will be held in Osage Beach, Mo., Jan. 22-24; for more information, call (800) 392-WINE.

Rain Forest Fruitcake

Health foodies like food to be sweet, heavy, chewy and brown--kind of like fruitcake, really, except that fruit cake is usually made with refined sugar and flour and non-organic, perhaps (eek!) sulfured dried fruit. Alaine’s Kitchen uses unsulfured fruits (dates, apricots and pineapple as well as raisins) and organic flour in its Rainforest Cake, which features brazil nuts from that rainy, forested country. It also makes Rainforest Lite, which could be called rainforest-less, since it leaves out the brazil nuts for 1% fat status and uses oat flour, tofu and rice milk in place of eggs, butter and wheat. You can order either kind by calling (818) 769-1115 or (800) 718-1115.

Extra-Virgin Butter

Retired auto executive Lee Iacocca now has a food and wine company, Nicola Corp. It’s test-marketing Olivio, a butter substitute that Iacocca says is the first to be made with olive oil. (Well, maybe in this country, but there’s been one in Australia for some time.)