Nighttime. A nine-seater plane takes off on a western heading for Tel Aviv. A doctor of agronomy whose face I can't see in the dark insists on chatting with the young man next to him. The little one's nose is pressed to the window; she's gazing down at the ground and saying, "They don't see us up here." The scientist, who can barely make himself heard over the noise of the engines, is shouting: "If organic is your religion, then eat organic. If not, then there are lots of questions to which the answers are not exactly organic, I must tell you."

For a long time, we had organic vegetables delivered at a pretty reasonable price from Teva Habesor. They were fine, but once we insisted on getting carrots out of season and ended up with a heap of orange, watermelon-shaped things that cost a fortune. The chef had been waiting patiently for just such an incident and said: "That's it, I can't take having them choose for me, I'm going back to the souk." At the souk we tried to buy as many fruits and vegetables as we could with the Carmel sticker on them, meaning they're up to European standards, but the prices were right up there with the organic stuff.

So what is a person to do, I asked my organic girlfriend, whose son gets only rice crackers without salt, cornflakes without sugar and freshly-squeezed orange juice. "You do whatever you can," she said earnestly. But when this mother isn't looking, her kid goes gaga for sweets like Hansel and Gretel did upon arriving at the witch's enchanted cottage in the forest.