CNN food and travel host Anthony Bourdain's excellent hour-long special on Israel-Palestine, in he which he explores both sides of the green line, begins with a line that could not ring truer for me. "It's easily the most contentious piece of real estate in the world. And there's no hope – none – of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off," he says of Israel-Palestine and particularly Jerusalem.

In the capital of haute cuisine, fast food is getting complicated. For starters, it's not always fast. At Le Camion Qui Fume, a food truck, the lunch crowd can wait up to an hour to get a made-to-order burger. And in a city where chefs can easily find everything they need to make sophisticated sauces and posh pastries, getting the goods for some fast food isn't so easy.

Napa and Sonoma have their wine tours, and travelers flock to Scotland to sample the fine single malt whiskies. But in Jamaica, farmers are offering a different kind of trip for a different type of connoisseur. Call them ganja tours: smoky, mystical — and technically illegal — journeys to some of the island's hidden cannabis plantations, where pot tourists can sample such strains as "purple kush" and "pineapple skunk."

At just 28 years old, Askar Baitassov has built the biggest restaurant business in Kazakhstan. Now he wants to introduce high quality Central Asian cuisine to the world. "I always dreamed of becoming rich by the time I was 25, so that I could buy myself a really expensive car," says Mr Baitassov. He is sipping on a blackcurrant drink at one of his numerous restaurants in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city and commercial centre.

A week ago, the chef to the French President was serving François Hollande, as he does regularly. But tonight in Washington DC, he’s a guest, serving himself at a buffet line of high-end American comfort food: fried chicken, collard greens, fresh corn and tomato salad. Off duty and dressed neatly in a polo shirt and slacks, he places a piece of fried chicken on his own plate, then picks up another in the tongs, and with a gracious nod, places a crispy drumstick on the plate of the person behind him in line.

Nelson Mandela is officially "improving," though still in critical condition at a South African hospital. His long battle with a lung infection has South Africans anxiously contemplating their "post-Mandela" future in a still racially divided country. In a unique strategy, one man is hoping to help heal those divisions with a pair of barbecue tongs. Jan Scannell is a 32-year-old former accountant with a dream: To establish a national holiday in South Africa like July 4 called Braai Day.

After buying coffee from Colombia for almost half a century, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) is finally opening a cafe there, part of its accelerating expansion in Latin America. The world’s largest coffee-shop operator will open a cafe in Bogota in the first half of next year and then five more locations later in 2014, Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said in a telephone interview. The stores will be operated through a joint venture between Alsea SAB (ALSEA*) and Grupo Nutresa SA (NUTRESA), and will sell locally sourced and roasted espresso and coffee.

Nephi Craig graduated from culinary school in 2000 and began a promising career. In a few years, he was working his way up the stations at Mary Elaine’s, Arizona’s only five-star French restaurant, led by James Beard Award–winning chef Bradford Thompson. “I was getting a great French, classical training, but something was missing,” says Craig, who is 33. “The French tradition isn’t my tradition, and I wanted to cook in the tradition of my people: Apaches and Navajos.”