Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Post-national Organic: Globalization
and the Field of Organic Food in Israel
Rafi Grosglik
8.1
Introduction
In 1993 McDonald's opened its first branch in Israel. The chain soon became a
clear culinary signifier of cultural globalization in Israel (Ram 2005 ). Seventeen
years later, Guy Maroz , a journalist specializing in the political-documentary
genre conducted a “sensational” television investigative report, accompanied by an
experiment: for a month he ate only organic food for the purpose of examining its
effect on his health. “ The idea was taken from Morgan Spurlock, the man from the
movie 'Super Size Me', who ate only McDonald's ” said the journalist. At the end
of the experiment, after continuously consuming organic foods, Maroz complained
that he gained 6 lb of body weight and poured ewers of scorn against the “ organic
food trend that conquered the Western world . 1 This media event demonstrates that
these days, organic food has become a symbol of Westernization and an object of
condemnation - exactly the way McDonald's was in the 1990s.
The literature dealing with the social aspects of organic agriculture is not blind to
the concept “globalization”. Some see the appearance of organic agriculture as the
most vocal opponent of industrial agriculture in the global era (Knight 2010 , p. 203)
and respectively, organic foodstuffs are perceived as the complete opposite of indus-
trialized foodstuffs. Some argue that with its emergence, in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, organic agriculture promoted concepts of production and consumption
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