Post-national Organic: Globalization and the Field of Organic Food in Israel - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 139

based on mutual trust, local knowledge, species diversity and social justice. These
concepts were derived from total resistance to industrialized food production based
on efficiency, competitiveness and standardization; and against food systems that
operate on a global scale (Arce and Marsden 1993 ; Murdoch et al. 2000 ).
On the opposite side, others claim that the field of organic food changed in the last
few years from a network of local producers and consumers to a global institutional-
ized and industrialized system, and became the food of social elite (Buck et al. 1997 ;
Guthman 1998 , 2004a ). In the United-States, for example, organic food attained
the scornful moniker “Yuppie-chow” (Guthman 2003 ). Accordingly, various studies
point to the accelerated new global economy of the last three decades as the
cause for transforming organic agriculture from an “alternative” social movement
to an agricultural industry with characteristics similar to conventional agriculture.
In these studies of what is known as the “conventionalization thesis” (Guthman
2004a ) it is argued that organic agriculture has been included, integrated and even
“hijacked” (Engler 2012 ) into the dominant forms of the “conventional” and global
agribusiness. This thesis points to the fallacy of the image that was cultivated by the
organic food industry as embodying an alternative cultural and economic philosophy
(Marsden and Arce 1995 ; Buck et al. 1997 ; Coombes and Campbell 1998 ; Guthman
1998 ), and suggests that the organic food sector became structurally assimilated into
the prevailing global-industrialized food systems (Guthman 2004b ).
These two theoretical perspectives (“o rganic food production oriented to locality
and driven by farmer-consumer partnership ” and “ organic food as driven by
industrial organized production ”) can be seen in the evolution of organic food and
in globalization as separate processes. But is the realm of organic food, essentially,
incompatible to globalization - and the inverse - are globalization and the processes
of organic food production interrelated?
Exploring the Israeli field of organic food reveals that its' emergence, in the mid
1980s, was actually a function of processes occurring in the global macro-social
level, and worked, essentially, to strengthen economic and cultural globalization in
Israel. Furthermore, an increase of demand for organic food by Israeli consumers
appeared from 2000 onward and a variety of production and distribution methods
were developed. I will argue that these new methods embody different symbolic and
materialistic aspects of globalization.
These arguments are based on an empirical study which included content analysis
of 36 leaflets and protocols published by the Israeli Bio-Organic Agriculture Orga-
nization (1989-2006), supplementary data collected from popular media reports
dealing with organic food in Israel and in-depth interviews with key agents and
actors in the Israeli organic food field.

8.2 Organic Food in Israel as a Global-Cultural-Artifact

During the last two decades organic agriculture has gone through an extensive
transformation and changed from an array of separate and local food systems to