Post-national Organic: Globalization and the Field of Organic Food in Israel - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 148

may terminate their subscription or renew it at will. They did not contribute to the
establishment of the farm, do not share in its management, and few of them take an
active part in the growing process.
That being the case, one can ask if this is a partnership. Where is the community
activity? To the founder of the CSA the answers seem obvious: a sense of
cooperation is provided through an active website and the virtual weekly newsletter
that she publishes. Thus, the relationship between farmers and customers is carried
out, as befits a global information era, not through a physical meeting, but through
a virtual meeting and the exchange of textual information. Global networking
technology, virtual in character, is what re-establishes, in practice, the sense of
partnership between growers and consumers.
Chobiza Farm currently provides a weekly box of vegetables to 450 families. The
number of people asking to join is growing. But the founder of Chobiza does not
want to widen the circle of customers:
We were contacted from all kinds of farmers' markets who proposed to advertise us and
we refused. We have no intention to grow. We do not want to gain customers. We are more
interested in finding a solution to the problem of gourd flies. We are farmers. Not merchants
(Taken from an Interview with Chobiza founder November 21, 2010).

Thus, the Israeli CSA represent an institutional actor which it's habitus includes
high organic cultural capital and local orientation, although global culture and
technology are those renewing this locality.

8.5 Discussion

This article demonstrates the centralism of global cultural and economic conditions
within the emergence and evolvement of the field of organic food in Israel. The
influence of global neo-liberalization on organic food, as it appears from these case
studies, is not restricted solely by conventionalization and structural changes that
occur in the production process itself. Global cultural and economic processes are
connected to the appearance of organic food and to the interaction between the fields
of organic food production and conventional food production. These processes play
a major role in the symbolic dimensions and political representations occurring in
the Israeli field of organic food.
The multiplicity of ideals, images and representations associated with organic
food in Israel turns it into a carrier of different (and even contradictory) post
modernist aspects: local ( Chobiza; Harduf between 1982 and 2002), national
(the beginning of organic agriculture in Sdeh Eliyahu ), Global/American ( Eden
Teva Market ), hyper-consumerism ( Eden Teva Market; Harduf 2002 onward)
and counter-consumerism ( Chobiza ), lifestyle, self-care and (symbolic) care for
community relationships ( Orbanic market).
The numerous representations of organic food are not unique to Israel, but the
modes of identity and identification connected to it are derived from two main