Hummus: The making of an Israeli culinary cult

Introduction

Both in public discourse, and in sections of the scholarly discussion, the relationship between industrial and artisanal food production is conceived in opposing terms. While industrial food is associated with uniformity, efficiency, rationality, impersonal production and global reach, the artisanal is associated with singularity, personal expertise, authenticity, tradition and locality. Within this conceptual framework, ‘the national’ is usually associated with the ‘authentic’ and ‘the local’, rather than with the industrial global. Thus, national distinction is often articulated through the artisanal preparation of ‘authentic’ local dishes (e.g. Caldwell, 2002; DeSoucey, 2010).

In this article we look at the history of the hummus industry in Israel as a case study for the relationship between the industrial and the artisanal domains. While hummus – an Arab dish adopted by Jews in Israel – has become an Israeli ‘national food’ and culinary cult, most of the hummus consumed in Israel is industrial. How did the industrialization of hummus affect both consumption patterns and the signification of the dish? What is the role of the food industry in making hummus into a culinary cult? Following recent scholarship, which offers a more complex picture of the relationship between industrial and artisanal food production (e.g. Heath and Meneley, 2007; Laudan, 2001; Meneley, 2007; Pilcher, 2006; Wilk, 2006a;), we regard the industrial and the artisanal not as opposites, but rather as interdependent and mutually constitutive categories, both of which are embedded in shifting configurations of local specificities and global flows.

Other factors too, e.g. the trends of health and ‘localness’, may account for the enormous popularity of hummus in Israel, especially over the last two decades. The fact that two of Israel’s most popular ‘national foods’ were adopted from the Arabs calls for an investigation into Israelis’ relationship with the culture of its colonized Others. Elsewhere Dafna Hirsch has discussed the relationship between political processes and hummus consumption in Israel (Hirsch, 2011). In this article we limit ourselves to the industrialization of hummus, and the relationship between the industrial and the artisanal domains. Therefore, questions of the Arab–Jewish relationship as they are manifested in the field of food consumption will be left out, unless they are directly related to the issue under consideration.

Our argument is threefold: first, we argue that the Israeli food industry has played a crucial role in turning hummus into a national symbol and a culinary cult. Second, we argue that the growing popularity of industrial hummus not only did not replace the consumption of artisanal hummus, but that this was the other way around. In fact, we assume that the recent flourishing of hummusiyot (hummus joints, singular: hummusiya) in Israel is dialectically related to the growing consumption of industrial hummus, which was to no small extent affected by the fierce competition between producers. Third, we argue that the industry is simultaneously an agent of globalization and of localization of hummus: it expands the spread of hummus globally, and at the same time it sometimes tries to fix a local (‘national’) identity to hummus. Thus, while industrial companies take pride in their ability to produce products that are always self-identical so as to satisfy consumers’ expectations, the sociocultural results of their strategies are often contradictory and unexpected.

Industrial vs. artisanal food

Of all the foods regularly consumed in Israel, there is one dish Israelis feel particularly passionate about: hummus. Hummus is consumed in Israel in huge amounts. It is an integral part of institutional receptions, children’s birthday party menus and kindergarten meals. In the thriving Israeli discourse on hummus, and especially the one that has developed over the last two decades, there are ample descriptions of hummus as an indispensable dish, and one of the main things Israelis miss when they go abroad. Hummus has also entered Israeli cultural production, with films, TV series, chapters, songs and artworks portraying various aspects of the dish and its consumption habits. ¹ Israelis, together with the Lebanese and the Syrians, are the world’s largest hummus consumers, and it is consumed by all segments of society (Arad, 1990).

The passionate discourse on hummus usually takes as its object hand-made hummus prepared in a hummusiya. Many hummus-lovers make a point of being ready to drive for hours in order to try out a new hummusiya with good reviews. In the last two decades hummus has also entered the Israeli gourmet discourse (see Hirsch, 2011: 624). Whereas in the early days of the Israeli gastronomic field hummus stood for ‘popular taste’, and was sometimes contrasted with ‘real gourmet food’, ² today it is often endorsed by gourmets and culinary experts. Consequently it has undergone differentiation, with artisanal hummus from a top hummusiya – usually Arab owned – ranked highest, and with industrial hummus at the bottom of the list.

This hierarchy is reflected in the 2000 guidebook to Israel’s best hummusiyot and olive oil producers compiled by Jewish journalist Yehuda Litani and Arab writer and scholar Naim Araidi (Litani and Araidi, 2000). In the opening chapter Litani narrates the history of hummus consumption in Israel, and states that the ‘hummus craze’ in Israel started after the 1967 occupation, when Israelis started to flock into East Jerusalem and West Bank restaurants. Litani is clearly telling the story of Jewish consumption of Arab hummus – the only hummus he considers worthy of its name, and in any case, of artisanal hummus. Industrial hummus, in contrast, is left out of his account, and mentioned only as the inferior Other of the real thing.

The contrast between artisanal and industrial taps into a larger discursive universe that presently supports the growing popularity of hummus, not only in Israel but in various countries in Europe and in North America: that which contrasts authenticity and tradition to mass production, health to industry, slow to fast food, and local production to globalized trade. As Anne Meneley writes, ‘[it] was when industrial food became readily available and cheap – and viewed with some derision and suspicion – that “the Mediterranean” became the positive Other for the North Atlantic, largely defined in terms of food that was imagined to be artisanally, instead of industrially, produced’ (Meneley, 2007: 684). True, most people who consume hummus in the western world consume it from a refrigerated tub, yet the success of industrial hummus is to a large extent dependent on the industry’s ability to align its products with the concepts that occupy the positive pole of these oppositions. For instance, the American company Tribe – purchased in 2008 by the third largest Israeli food corporation, Osem – states on its webpage:

A Mediterranean classic, hummus tastes best when kept all natural. Building on the simplicity of hummus is part art, part science, and also Tribe’s specialty. A good hummus has just the right balance of flavor and texture, and so at Tribe we’ve spent decades mastering all sorts of hummus recipes. (Tribe, n.d.)

A similar logic – whether made explicit or implicit – underlies various scholarly critiques of the food industry (e.g. Nestle, 2007; Ritzer, 1998, 2010; Schlosser, 2001). In the context of Israeli society, sociologist Uri Ram contrasts in his book on the globalization of Israel ‘artisanal’ falafel – a dish that many in Israel still cite as the ‘official’ national dish – with the standardized falafel of chain restaurants. The McDonaldization of Israeli eating habits, Ram argues, have in fact led to the renaissance of falafel, whose consumption was on the decline for some time. However, while a small part of the falafel industry has been ‘gourmetized’, much of it has been ‘McDonaldized’, i.e. transformed into an industrial-standardized system (2008: 181–187). This serves to demonstrate Ram’s general argument, that globalization brings about homogenization on the structural level, and heterogenization on the symbolic level.

However, while these binaries may be sometimes useful as analytic ideal-types, as Richard Wilk writes, the real world is more complex than any binary opposition or simple evolutionary sequence (Wilk, 2006b: 15, 23). First, the food industry did more than mass-produce various ‘authentic’ or ‘national’ dishes (e.g. Pilcher, 2006); often it facilitated the emergence of a ‘national cuisine,’ allowing partial standardization of food consumption across regional variation (Goody, 19862: 154). ³ Second, the very construction of certain dishes as ‘authentic’ or ‘artisanal’ is imbricated in various ways in global industrial production processes, including standardized technoscientific testing (Heath and Menele 2007: 594). Moreover, as Rachel Laudan writes, many ‘traditional’ foods were in fact dependent on the industrialization of staples such as salt, flour, sugar and oils (Lauden, 2001: 42–43). What today is considered ‘local’ and ‘traditional,’ then, often already incorporates different phases of industrial production (Wilk, 2006b: 16), and various manifestations of global flows.

Globalization of certain products may involve localization not only in the sense of attributing local meanings or patterns of consumption to global commodities, but also in the sense of global commodities owing their prestige to their association with a particular locale (e.g. van Esterik, 2006). Especially in the case of the food market, where ‘authenticity’ has gained symbolic currency, industrially produced food from distant lands may bear the signature of authenticity, regardless of its being mass produced. As Richard Wilk writes, the global/industrial food system includes simultaneous movements toward generification, homogeneity and mass production, and new kinds of localization (Wilk, 2006b: 19).

As we will show below using the case study of hummus in Israel, the food industry has played a decisive role in shaping both consumption patterns and the meanings attached to the dish. By using nationalist sentiments to promote its products, and by making hummus easily accessible to the entire population, the food industry has served as a prominent agent of what Michaela DeSoucey (2010) has termed ‘gastronationalism’, i.e. the use of food production, distribution and consumption to demarcate and sustain the emotive power of national attachment, as well as the use of nationalist sentiments to produce and market food. Thus the industry has served as an agent of ‘localization’ even when it started marketing its products to growing markets abroad.

The food industry not only marked hummus ‘a national food’; it is our contention that the industry played a significant role in turning hummus into a culinary cult. It is of course difficult, if not impossible, to account for all the factors that shape consumption and mediate taste. Some of these factors are material (the availability of certain foods, their nutritional and caloric value, their price, etc.); others concern meanings, as taste, like any other component of ‘experience,’ is at least partially discursively produced (Appadurai, 1981; Scott, 1992). The proliferation of discourse around hummus over the last decade and a half coincided with the competition between two of the largest Israeli food corporations over the market for chilled hummus, and their investment of huge sums of money in promoting hummus as the most desirable Israeli dish.

The importance of the industry in elevating hummus to the position of a culinary cult may be gauged from comparing its fate to that of falafel. Although the ascent of hummus and the descent of falafel as a ‘national food’ in Israel was influenced by other factors – e.g. the current attention to health in food consumption, with its rejection of fried foods – it was no doubt affected by their different amenability to industrialization: while the industrial version of falafel requires preparation and frying, in the case of hummus the industry provides a dish ready to eat, which may be easily consumed in any setting.

In what follows we trace the history of the industrialization of hummus in Israel from the late 1950s to the present. Our aim is not to provide an exhaustive history of the hummus industry, but rather to illustrate the industry’s role as an agent of gastronationalism, which extends beyond the industrial domain. First we show how the hummus industry from its inception employed the idiom of nationalism to promote its products. We then show how the entry of Israel’s leading food corporations to the field of hummus production affected not only the repertoire of hummus products, but also the discourse on hummus and the practices of its consumption, spanning both the industrial and the artisanal domains. Finally, we show how the globalization of industrial hummus may go hand in hand with attempts to ‘localize’ its identity as a ‘national dish’.

This article forms a part of wider historical-ethnographic research on hummus production and consumption in Israel since the Mandate period to the present. It draws on combined qualitative methodologies, including archival research, interviews, participant observation and analysis of printed and digital sources. Out of 21 formal interviews conducted so far, four are with people who have been involved in the hummus industry. We conducted two visits to hummus factories, where we were guided through the production process. A most valuable source is digitalized archives of seven daily newspapers published in Palestine and Israel. We have collected more than a thousand items were hummus is mentioned. Newspapers, as well as internet sources of various kinds (items from news portals, company websites etc.), have served both as objects for discourse analysis, and as sources for information. While we always approached data provided in the media with caution, it nevertheless formed an indispensable source, e.g. for learning about new products, hummus events and publicity campaigns.

The industrialization of Hummus in Israel

Before the foundation of the state of Israel, hummus was not well known among Jews in Palestine (in contrast to falafel, which became a popular street food in the late 1930s (Cornfeld, 1939)). It grew in popularity over the 1950s, thanks to the ascent of the ‘oriental restaurant’ (Ben-Isser, 1957), which served hummus alongside other Arab dishes such as tahini, falafel and roasted meat. Many of these restaurants were opened by Mizrahi Jewish immigrants, i.e. immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, who arrived to Israel in large numbers after the foundation of the state. Although most of these immigrants did not consume hummus in their countries of origin, they were quick to integrate such Arab staples into their menu (Hirsch, 2011: 621).

No other field of Middle Eastern cultural production seems to have enjoyed as much success among Jews in Israel as food. Israel has always aspired to constitute itself as a stronghold of western civilization in the Middle East (Shohat, 1988). Thus, the cultural production of both Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, who were considered ‘the Orient within’, was generally degraded and marginalized in Israeli society, where Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. Jews who emigrated from Europe) predominated. At the same time, Ashkenazi Jews, seeking to overthrow the culture of the Diaspora, saw in various sections of the Arab cuisine a worthy substitute. However, while certain Arab foods became popular in the public sphere, during the 1950s Arab dishes had not yet penetrated the homes of Ashkenazi Jews.

By the late 1950s hummus was already quite popular, but had not yet attained the status of a casual food consumed regularly at home. One testimony to the popularity of hummus, especially among the younger generation, appears in nutritionist Lilian Cornfeld’s column in the Ha’aretz daily newspaper, where she states that ‘guests always welcome hummus and Tahini, especially at young people’s parties’ (Cornfled, 1958).

The growing popularity of hummus was spotted by Telma – a brand of the ‘Eretz Israeli Food Produce’ company (Tozeret Mazon Eretz Israelit) – which seized the commercial opportunity and came out with canned hummus as well as falafel powder in 1958. The company was founded in 1938 by a refugee from Nazi Germany, Dr Arnold Hildesheimr, in cooperation with British Unilever, and in 1947 it established the Telma brand (Heiman, 1998). The development process of hummus was long and arduous because of a number of technical problems that Telma had to solve. Eventually a product that only slightly resembled what today goes by the name of hummus set on its way. ⁴

The success of ‘Hummus Telma’ was spectacular: in 1962 Telma advertised the production of its 500,000th can of hummus; by 1968 the company had produced its 15,000,000th can! ⁵ (Israel’s population in 1968 amounted to no more than 3 million people.) According to company surveys ‘Hummus Telma’ was consumed by all segments of Israeli society – secular and religious Jews, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, men and women, including Arabs. Telma even exported its hummus abroad, including, indirectly, to Arab countries, ⁶ yet most consumption was local. ⁷ According to a 1964 survey of the changing eating habits among immigrant families along three generations, it was found that most of those who consumed hummus – mainly from the second generation – were introduced to it in the grocery store (Bavli, 1964: 10).

Telma’s publicity campaign included newspaper advertisements and newsreel filmed commercials. ⁸ Several of Telma’s commercials presented hummus as an ‘oriental’ – though not Arab – dish. For instance, a 1961 newsreel commercial showed a Jewish Yemenite couple in a traditional attire enter a fancy hotel restaurant, order a couple of pitas and take out a can of hummus from their satchel. ⁹ But most of Telma’s advertisements marketed hummus as an ‘all-Israeli’ dish (when figures were shown in the advertisements they were usually marked as Ashkenazi, see Figure 1). They presented hummus as a healthy, easy-to-prepare dish, which could be consumed either at home or outdoors, and which was appropriate both for casual meals and for special events. Its slogan was: ‘Clean. Fresh. Healthy’ (implicitly alluding to the perception of hand-made ‘oriental food’ as dirty). And it was Telma which first entitled hummus a ‘national dish’ in the framework of its publicity campaign: ‘Knish or verenikas. Not all your guests are familiar with these eastern European dishes. But everybody eats hummus enthusiastically – hummus, the Israeli national dish.’ ¹⁰ In this advertisement hummus functions as a signifier of locality, its popularity attesting to the successful integration of the Jews into the Mediterranean space and the shedding of the ‘old’ culture of the Eastern European Diaspora (see also Grosglik, 2011). OPEN IN VIEWER

The industrialization of hummus facilitated its penetration into official presentations of ‘Israeli food’. Between 1954 and 1965 Israel went through a quick and intensive process of state-directed industrialization (Gross, 2000). The latter part of this period coincided with both governmental and non-governmental efforts to shape an Israeli ‘national cuisine’ (Raviv, 2002: 206–246). Thus, industrial products had a pride of place in various presentations of ‘Israeli food’. Since the late 1950s, industrial hummus, falafel and sometimes also gefilltefish represented ‘Israeli cuisine’ in food exhibitions and ‘Israel weeks’ that were held in various countries (Avidar 1959; Bloch, 1966; Namir, 1967), as well as in presentations of ‘Israeli food’ at home. ¹¹ Most presentations were organized by the ‘Israeli Company for Exhibitions and Fairs’, which was sponsored by both governmental and commercial bodies. Thus the state project of forging a national culture was fused with the economic interests of the Israeli industry.

Following Telma’s success several other food companies began to produce hummus for the retail market, but none was as successful. Simultaneously various small factories began to produce chilled hummus for the wholesale market, most notably for ‘oriental restaurants’, many of which served industrial hummus rather than hand-made versions of the dish. By the mid 1980s there were already several dozens of small and medium sized factories, as well as some 100 kitchens that produced hummus for restaurants, delicatessens and other institutions (Arad, 1985). The poor sanitary conditions in some of these factories (e.g. Nadel, 1970), and the poor quality of the products, opened the door for more aspiring entrepreneurs. According to Zvi Dreizin, who founded Shamir Salads in 1974, the growing competition between producers in the late 1970s–early 1980s encouraged him to invest a fortune in sophisticated machinery that allowed a higher degree of control over the production process, and consequently the production of better and more hygienic products. ¹²

The industry, then, has served as an agent of gastronationalism both by making hummus easily accessible to Israeli consumers, and by promoting the signification of hummus as a national dish through its publicity campaigns. What is conspicuous about hummus advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s is their gendering and ethnicizing both production and consumption (see Figures 2 and 3). When the figure in the advertisement represents the producer, it is always marked as ‘oriental’ and male (until now, hummus makers in hummusiyot have usually been men, with few exceptions); when the figures represent consumers, they are always marked as Ashkenazi – predominantly women, who are in charge of providing their family with food. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Osem hummus powder advertisement, 1978.

When oriental men appear in the advertisements, they are either marked as ‘general orientals’, or as oriental Jews, mostly Yemenites. Thus, at the same time that the industry presented an ethnicized image of production and consumption, it also promoted the ‘Israelization’ of hummus, by associating it with Mizrahi Jews, rather than with Arabs. Interestingly, what signifies Mizrahi identity in these advertisements is either hair (moustache and sometimes side-locks) or ‘traditional costume’ (or both). By this they render Mizrahi Jews outsiders to the Israeli collective, while implying that Mizrahi identity consists of a set of external characteristics and therefore may be shed at will.

The industry expands

By the late 1980s hummus was already considered an indispensable dish, so that when in 1987 the consumer-oriented investigative TV program ‘Kolbotek’ exposed high levels of coliform bacteria in the hummus of several popular restaurants, it received the attention of an almost national catastrophe (e.g. Yariv, 1988). The Kolbotek affair boosted the consumption of industrial hummus (Chen, 2001). However, it is only since the mid 1990s that a quantitative as well as qualitative change in hummus consumption in Israel has taken place. According to the marketing manager of the salads department of Strauss – one of the two leading hummus producing companies in Israel – between the mid 1990s and 2001 consumption of industrial hummus in Israel almost doubled (Chen, 2001). Hummus has also become an object of a thriving discourse, more passionate than ever before. This process was in no small part affected by the change in the profile of hummus producing firms, and of the Israeli market in general. The hummus market became increasingly controlled by two food corporations, which have grown stronger than ever before. These corporations invested huge sums of money both in product development and in marketing. By constructing hummus as a necessary product on the menus of Israeli consumers, corporate strategies contributed to increasing the hummus mania.

Since the mid 1980s Israel underwent a swift process of economic liberalization (Shalev, 1999). In this process, the power of the Israeli business sector increased significantly. Privatization led to concentration of much power in the hands of several groups (Maman, 2004: 130). With the backing of the Israeli state, this sector considerably augmented the share of its activities abroad (Shalev, 1999: 132). Simultaneously, the activity of multinational corporations in Israel increased (Svirski, 2004: 73). Some of these corporations formed partnerships with, or gained control of, Israeli hummus producing firms – a process that left its mark on the Israeli hummus market.

In the early 1990s, the Strauss food corporation – today the second largest food and drink corporation in Israel (Strauss Group, n.d.a) – identified the potential of the salads market and purchased a small and relatively successful salads producing firm. Strauss invested unprecedented sums of money first in product development and then in publicity and marketing. ¹³ It hired a group of three experts to develop a new hummus recipe. The three presented Strauss with a product that was nothing like the other industrial hummus products available on the Israeli market at the time: it was less acidic and its texture resembled mayonnaise. At first Strauss was skeptical but eventually it adopted the new recipe and within a couple of years Strauss’s hummus – which later changed its name to ‘Hummus Achla’ – became a huge success. ¹⁴

During the 1990s Strauss controlled the market. In the year 2000 Strauss’s share of the chilled salads market amounted to almost 60 percent with two other firms – Tzabar and Shamir – lagging far behind. ¹⁵ However Tzabar began to catch up: since 2002 it has become the leading hummus producer in Israel. ¹⁶ This happened after Tzabar was purchased by Osem in 2000, which itself came under the control of the international food giant Nestlé. ¹⁷ Both Osem and Nestlé brought new work methods and marketing strategies to the company, such as the need to constantly innovate by coming up with new products, new packaging, etc. In the words of Mati Yahav, the Tzabar marketing manager, Nestlé gave Tzabar a ‘marketing school’, while Osem wanted ‘to be the number one’ in every category. ¹⁸

The branding of hummus by both Strauss and Tzabar reflects the double logic of ‘the global postmodern’ (Hall, 1993; 1997): globalization and localization, merging an appeal to nationalist sentiments with global trends such as ‘authenticity’ and health (e.g. Johnston and Baumann, 2010). The Strauss campaign has emphasized the ‘all-Israeliness’ of hummus (for instance, soldiers, the ultimate symbol of patriotic Israeliness, figure in several of its TV commercials). Many of its commercials carry homey connotations, and present hummus as a food for the entire family. ¹⁹ Although the name of the hummus, Achla, is an Arabic word, it has been naturalized in Hebrew long ago. ²⁰ While health has not been a central concept in Strauss’s hummus campaigns, it occupies an important place in its overall ‘corporate vision’ (Strauss Group, n.d.b). In 2009, in response to criticisms concerning the unhealthiness of industrial hummus, Strauss focused its advertisements on its shift to canola oil.

Tzabar, which sought to distinguish itself from Strauss, built its campaign around the concept of authenticity. According to a document presented by Tzabar to a publicity competition, people used to think of industrial hummus as a ‘synthetic’ product, which is a substitute for the ‘real thing’ – salads prepared in a restaurant, ‘personally and from the heart’. Other values that were chosen to represent hummus, besides ‘authenticity,’ were ‘taste,’ ‘expertise’ and ‘love for the work (of preparation)’ (McCann Erickson, 2008b). At first the advertisers attempted to bestow authenticity on the product by choosing a Mizrahi Jewish actor to lead the campaign. As the trend of considering Arab-made hummus superior and more authentic than Jewish-made hummus grew stronger (Hirsch, 2011: 622–626), Tzabar started to integrate Arab hummus chefs in its campaign. In 2004 it released a TV commercial in which Cohen makes peace between two Arab restaurant owners and family members from the village Abu Ghosh – an Israeli hummus Mecca – who fought over the question, who could use the name ‘Abu Shukri’. This commercial is remembered for the slogan: ‘Hummus is either made with love or not made at all.’ ²¹

It was not long before other hummus producing companies began to resort to the concept of ‘authenticity’ in their marketing strategies, either by integrating Mizrahi or Arab figures in their campaigns, or by coming out with a non-branded line of products that they marketed as ‘home made’. ²² In response, Tzabar sought to ‘re-break the record of authenticity’ (McCann Erickson, 2008a): it collaborated with Jordanian hummus restaurant owner Nehad Al-Chan and came out with a new line of hummus – ‘Nehad’s hummus’. Tzabar even opened a makeshift hummusiya for Nehad in Old Jaffa. The opening of the hummusiya, with celebrities, a drink bar, and even a belly dancer, received much media attention. Today, too, Tzabar collaborates with famous Arab hummus chefs such as Abu Maruan from Jaffa and Abu Maher from Kufr Yassif to create new lines of upgraded industrial hummus, carrying the chefs’ names.

Tzabar has sought to associate its products with ‘authentic’ hummus prepared in a hummusiya in other ways as well. For instance, in 2003 it organized a successful hummus festival in Tel Aviv, where hummus restaurants from all over the country sold their hummus (Cohen, 2004). More festivals were held in following years. Towards Independence Day 2010, Tzabar, together with the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir, came up with a project of mapping the best hummusiyot in Israel (including East Jerusalem). ²³ The Tzabar website itself contains a search engine for hummusiyot all over the country.

In a survey conducted between 530 consumers in 2005, hummus was chosen as the ‘most Israeli’ industrial product (Koten, 2005). In the same year Tzabar conducted a survey and found that 95 percent of Israeli households had a tub of hummus in their fridge (Grin, 2005). Although this may well be an exaggeration, Israeli hummus consumption is extremely high and growing. According to one source, in 2004 Israelis consumed an average of 8 kilos of industrial hummus per year (Grin, 2005). In 2010 the revenues of the hummus market in Israel was over 117 million dollars a year (Orly and Guy Ltd, 2010). But not only is the consumption of industrial hummus on the rise. The struggles between manufacturers, which promoted an intensive and emotional discourse around hummus, contributed to the increase in the consumption of hummus in hummusiyot as well: according to a report in the Channel 2 TV news, in the year 2009 alone over 150 new hummusiyot were opened in Israel (Channel 2, 2009). Although we could not validate this number, it is evident that over the last decade and a half hummus consumption in hummusiyot has become an Israeli cult, more popular than ever before. ²⁴ This process does not easily fit into the distinction between structural homogeneity and cultural heterogeneity that Ram suggests.

One of the reasons for the success of hummus is its image as health food. While home-made hummus is indeed healthy, industrial hummus is less so, especially due to the high level of fat added to the product instead of more tahini, in order to lower production costs. In light of the success of industrial hummus, occasional articles on the health hazards of industrial hummus appear in the Israeli press. Such articles often cause a temporary decrease in sales, but the decrease does not last very long (e.g. Kadosh, 2007). And although industrial hummus is considered inferior to hand-made hummus, it is also consumed by many gourmets, who often regard it as a kind of ‘emergency hummus’, when the ‘real thing’ cannot be obtained. ²⁵

Studies show how artisanal food and drink producers often construct their expertise in opposition to the industrial apparatus of large-scale firms (e.g. Heath and Meneley, 2007; Terrio, 2005). Some Israeli artisanal hummus producers adopt an anti-industrial stance as well: for example, an owner of an old-time hummusiya in Haifa lamented the fact that ‘Russian Jews’ and ‘some Arabs’ prefer to buy industrial hummus, in spite of the fact that it contained preservatives. ‘I don’t go with anyone’, he emphasized while telling us about Tzabar’s offer to develop a line of hummus on his name. ²⁶ Others, however, seem content to cooperate with the industry. After all, artisanal hummus does not compete with industrial hummus in the same market, as these two types of hummus are differentiated less by different consumers and more by their functions and contexts of consumption: eating hummus in a hummusiya may be merely functional, but often it is also a social event. Buying hummus from a hummusiya for home consumption, however, is a different story: hummusiyot are not always at hand, while industrial hummus can be obtained at any grocery store, is cheaper and lasts much longer than home-made hummus, which lasts no more than two to three days before it spoils. Thus, Abu Maruan did not shy from hanging a big sign advertising Tzabar’s hummus on the wall of his hummusiya in the beginning of its Arab chefs’ campaign.

Hummus goes global

In recent years hummus has increasingly become a global commodity, popular in many countries outside the Middle East. In the UK, for instance, industrial hummus is a regular product on the shelves of almost any supermarket. In the USA the market for industrial hummus has expanded from $100 million in the early 2000s, to $230 million in 2009 (Levantar-Roberts, 2010). Israeli companies have fared well in this process. As of July 2012, the largest hummus producing company in the US is Sabra. Founded by an Israeli entrepreneur in the mid 1980s, since 2005 Sabra has been controlled by Strauss, and since 2007 it has been co-owned by Strauss and Pepsico. In fact, Strauss and Osem have extended their competition to the American market: in 2008 Osem purchased another successful American hummus producing company – Tribe – and is now seeking ways to repeat its success in the Israeli market, in the US (Zoref and Dovrat, 2009).

In this section we argue that even in the context of increasing globalization of hummus the industry may serve as an agent of ‘localization’ as well. In the literature on globalization, localization has often been understood as a response to globalization, usually in places outside the West (Appadurai, 1996; Hall, 1997: 183; Watson, 1997). In this case, however, localization does not consist in local reactions to, or adaptations of, a global commodity but in attempts to attribute to hummus a specific national identity (see also Bestor, 2005: 18). As we will show below, ‘localization’ in the case of hummus is not a self-evident process but is fraught with tensions and contradictions (see also: Ariel, 2012).

In light of the success of Israeli firms abroad, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists (ALI) petitioned to the Lebanese ministry of Economy and Trade in 2008 to request protected status from the European Commission for hummus, and several other dishes, as uniquely Lebanese foods, using the example of products like feta cheese and Champagne. Once granted, they would be able to ban Israel from marketing these foods in the EU under their original name. To the best of our knowledge, such a request has not yet been filed.

ALI’s plan to request protected status for hummus is the context for the recent war of hummus records between Lebanon and Israel. Since 1995 Israeli hummus producing companies have occasionally set a ‘largest hummus plate’ world’s record in the framework of their marketing campaigns. In October 2009 Lebanese chefs prepared a dish of over 2 tons and broke the Israeli record. According to press reports, after preparing the gigantic dish, which was decorated with the Lebanese flag, the chefs gathered to sing the Lebanese national anthem. The organizers of the event referred to it as a ‘patriotic demonstration of an international scale’. ²⁷ Several weeks later, Arab businessman and restaurant owner Jawadat Ibrahim from Abu Ghosh announced his intention to break the Lebanese record and ‘bring back the honor to the state of Israel’. ²⁸ Ibrahim broke the Lebanese record in January 2010, with a dish of over 4 tons. In May 2010 Lebanon had broken the record again, with a plate weighing a total of 10,452 kilograms, which represents Lebanon’s total area of 10,452 square kilometers (Guinness World Records, 2010).

While these displays of culinary patriotism do not directly serve the interests of specific corporations, the fact that both Fadi Abboud, the head of ALI at the time, and Jawadat Ibrahim are involved in the hummus industry in their respective countries – Abboud as the owner of the first factory to produce chilled hummus in Lebanon, ²⁹ and Ibrahim as a new partner in an Israeli salads producing firm (Goldstein, 2006) – speaks volumes to the fact that something more than sheer patriotism is at stake. As Ari Ariel writes, with the rise of global hummus consumption, authenticity takes on an economic value (Ariel, 2012: 37). While Abboud’s anger at seeing hummus being marketed as ‘Israeli’ may not stem exclusively from a sense of economic loss, at the least the ‘hummus war’ represents the fusion of nationalist sentiments with economic interest in the context of competition over global markets.

However, although media representations of the Abu Ghosh event, including by Ibrahim himself, constructed it as an ‘Israeli’ refutation of the Lebanese claim of ownership, the most pronounced meanings conveyed by the staging of the event itself were other than Israeli patriotism. First, all around was publicity for the sponsoring companies, and primarily for the Israeli hummus manufacturer Miki Delicatessen, where Ibrahim had become a partner. When we arrived at the scene we saw some dozen men dressed with white robes and chef’s hats, decorated with the Miki logo, pouring the contents of ‘Miki’ plastic cases into the huge satellite dish that served as the container for the hummus. The cases, we were told, came from the Miki factory, whose facilities were used to prepare the hummus. The flag in the center of the dish was not the national flag but rather the flag of the ‘Abu Ghosh’ restaurant, owned by Ibrahim. The only symbols of Israeli nationalism on site were the Israeli flags that decorated the village lampposts and a batch of blue and white balloons that were released into the air in the end of the ceremony.

Second, the identities emphasized by the event were both above and below the nation state. On the one hand hummus was presented as a ‘Middle Eastern’ dish that has the capacity to breach the gaps between Jews and Arabs. In the words of famous Arab soccer broadcaster Zoheir Ba’alul, who moderated the event: ‘hummus is the real intermediary in the Middle East’. Ibrahim even invited the Lebanese to join in the breaking of the new record. On the other hand, the event emphasized local-patriotic messages: it was presented as a festival day in the village of Abu Ghosh. Throughout the ceremony both singers and speakers spoke in praise of Abu Ghosh. Indeed, for the young Abu-Ghoshians who gathered on the site, this was mainly a local feast for a village that owes its existence in Jewish Israeli consciousness mainly to hummus, and that received for a moment the attention of world media.

It seems that no less than promoting Israeli hummus abroad (or at least claiming the right of Israeli companies to sell ‘hummus’ abroad), the event was staged to promote Abu-Ghosh hummus, and particularly Ibrahim’s restaurant, at home. When Ibrahim had said that ‘the Lebanese can claim whatever they want, but the hummus is ours, Israelis. We, in any case, prepare it better’ (Sardas-Trotino, 2009), no Israeli would read this as referring to Miki Delicatessen. In the context of discourse about hummus, neither would most Israelis feel the dissonance of a ‘we’ coming from an Arab citizen of Israel. By breaking the Lebanese record at Abu-Ghosh, Ibrahim attempted to mark both hummus and himself as ‘Israeli’. At the least, such an effort requires a very big dish.

Conclusion

The Israeli passion for hummus is usually portrayed, implicitly or explicitly, as a passion for fresh hummus prepared in a hummusiya. Yet the social and cultural career of hummus in Israel cannot be detached from the food industry, both as a supplier of new products and patterns of consumption, and as an agent of discourses and meanings, the effects of which extend beyond the industrial domain.

In this article we offered a historical account of the hummus industry in Israel focusing on its role as an agent of gastronationalism. The food industry has played an important role in turning hummus into a ‘national dish’ and a culinary cult by making hummus easily available to Israeli consumers; by contributing to the expansion of the hummus market through its campaigns; and by appropriating the national idiom to promote its products. Even as the industry played a central role in making hummus a globalized commodity, it continued to function as an agent of ‘localization,’ promoting hummus as a ‘national food’.

One of the claims sometimes made in relation to industrial hummus is that ‘it’s not the same food (as hand-made hummus)’. Yet what is and isn’t ‘the same’ is not a fact of nature but of human categorization, which is always pertinent to specific projects (Eco, 1985). While such claims may come from foodies who strive to distinguish themselves from ‘ordinary’ consumers, it seems that for the majority of consumers they are considered versions of the same food. As we argued in this article, rather than being separate and opposite realms, the industrial and the artisanal are interrelated realms of production and consumption. Thus, developments in the field of industrial production over the last two decades – particularly the fierce competition between powerful producers – have raised the importance of hummus both as a consumer good and as an object of discourse, and boosted the consumption of artisanal hummus as well.

Our aim in this article was not to replace a critique of the food industry with an empathic or apathetic account. The grim effects of the industry’s quest for increased profit on factors such as consumers’ health and workers’ welfare have been amply documented by scholars. Rather, what we wish to emphasize is that in order to better understand the role of the food industry in contemporary society we need to go beyond ‘standardization’ to examine the manifold ways in which it functions as a social and cultural agent, and its interaction with other modes of production and consumption.