Post-national Organic: Globalization and the Field of Organic Food in Israel - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 143

Table 8.1 Increase in export
volume of organic produce in
Israel

Export volume Financial turnover

1993 6,400 t 40 million NIS a

1 billion NIS a 2008 80,000 t

Sources: (Eytan 1993 , p. 8 [in Hebrew];

Meirav 2009 [in Hebrew])
a NIS New Israelian Shekels

organization and a conventional trading company is the basis for the creation and
growth of the field of organic food in Israel (see Table 8.1 ).
Levi 's political outlook (which sees agriculture as an integral part of the Zionist
national task); his being a part of conventional agricultural establishment; his
professional moves that matched the formal national encouragement to find new
export agricultural branches (in order to cope with a crisis in Israeli conventional
agriculture) - all of these testify that the appearance of organic food in Israel was
not related to any counter-culture ideology. It did not emerge from any ideological
resistance to the conventional agricultural establishment. On the contrary - during
almost two decades the organic supply for Israeli consumers was minimal and the
attitude to organic agriculture was as a replacement for effected export branches.
Thus, organic agriculture was preserved as a sector that has the potential to
strengthen the national-agricultural project and as a means of integration into the
global capitalist economy.
Furthermore, during this period the Israeli Organization of Organic Agriculture
established many organic farms in Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories
under Israeli military control. This act loaded organic agriculture with neo-national
local meanings (i.e. the neo-Zionist perspective of Jewish rights to the land of Israel,
including Palestinian territories).
Thus, the dialectics which is typical to the glocalization era can be discerned in
this early stage for the operation of the organic field: on the one hand - openness
to the global economy through export of organic food, but on the other hand -
using organic agriculture to promote local-national projects. In any case, these
two processes were integrated with national and conventional agribusiness (and
certainly do not represent opposition to it). As such, this early stage represents
performance that might be identified with low organic cultural capital and local-
national orientation.

8.4 From Agricultural Production to Cultural Production

In the last two decades the interest shown by Israelis in eating as a form of
entertainment and in food as an expression of lifestyle is growing. As a result, the
proliferation of unique and refined foods - ethnic foods, gourmet food, homemade
and slow foods, artisan foods and organic food - has become prominent in the new
Israeli culinary repertoire (Table 8.2 ).