Joan Dye Gussow, nutritionist and educator who was often called the matriarch of the food movement “eating locally, thinking on a global scale”, died on Friday at his home in Piermont, NY, in the county of Rockland. She was 96 years old.
His death, congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, associate professor of nutritional teaching at Teachers College of the University of Columbia, where Ms. Gussow, professor emeritus, had taught for more than half a century.
Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to highlight the links between agricultural practices and consumer health. His book “The Feeding Web: from in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thoughts of writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and others.
“Nutrition is considered to be the science of what happens to food once it has entered our body – as Joan said,” what’s going on after swallowing “,” said Koch in an interview.
But Mrs. Gussow brought her attention to the eyes of Gimlet on what is happening before Swallow it. “His concern concerned all the things that had to happen so that we get our food,” said Koch. “It aimed to see the overview of food problems and sustainability.”
Ms. Gussow, a tireless gardener and a small bumper for community gardens, began to deploy the phrase “local food” after examining statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and Ranch families represented less than 5% of the population in 1970 and less than 2% of the population in 2023.)
As Ms. Gussow has seen, the disappearance of farms meant that consumers did not know how their food is cultivated – and, more critical, could not know how their food should be cultivated. “She said,” We have to make sure to keep the farms so that we have this knowledge “,” said Koch.
Marion Nestlé, nutritionist and defender of public health, said that Ms. Gussow “was extremely ahead of her time”, adding: “Every time I thought I was on something and that I spent new terrains and seeing something that no one had seen before, I would discover that Joan had written 10 years earlier.”
“She was a penetrating food systems before anyone who did not know what a food system was,” said Ms. Nestle, referring to the process of production and food consumption, including economic, environmental and health effects. “What she understood is that you could not understand why people eat as they do and why nutrition works as if you understand how agricultural production works. She was a deep thinker.
Ms. Gussow was not the type to avoid food struggle. It spoke of energy consumption, pollution, obesity and diabetes while consumer prices paid for what they consumed at a time when this point of view did not earn friends or influenced people. It has been labeled “a free-root crank”, as A profile of the New York Times noted in 2010.
But the sheathing of Ms. Gussow later became the Gospel.
“Joan was one of my most important teachers when I started discovering the food system,” wrote Mr. Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”, wrote in an email. “When I asked her what nutrition advice, her years of research have resolved, she said, very simply, to eat food”. “
“After a slight development,” continued Mr. Pollan, “this has become the heart of my answer to the supposedly very complicated question on what people should eat if they are concerned about their health:” Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants. “(This answer also appeared in the first lines of” in the defense of food “.)
Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in Alhambra, California, Chester and Mr. Joyce (Fisher) Dye. His father was a civil engineer.
After graduating from Pomona College in 1950, she moved to New York, where she spent seven years as a researcher at Time magazine. In 1956, she married Alan M. Gussow, painter and ecologist.
Ms. Gussow made a disturbing observation when she and her husband, who had recently become parents, moved in the suburbs in the early 1960s and began to shop in local grocery stores. “You know,” she said in an interview for years later, “we went from 800 articles to 18,000 articles in the supermarket, and they were mainly unwanted.”
Ms. Gussow returned to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972, she published the article “The messages from the Commission for Television Advertising for Children” in the Journal of Nutrition Education. His research has shown that 82% of the advertisements broadcast during several Saturday mornings were intended for food – most of them in the nutrition.
She had previously testified to a Congress Committee on the subject. Italment, as it turned out.
But in an interview of 2011 published on Civil Eats, an information site focused on the American food system, Ms. Gussow stressed at least small parts of progress.
“I must say that in relation to the reception that my ideas had 30 years ago, it is quite amazing the reception they get now,” she said. “I am delighted to see the kind of thing that happens in Brooklyn, for example. People plug meat, raising chicken. But, she added, “whether or not there will be sea change throughout the system is so difficult to judge.”
Admittedly, Ms. Gussow practiced what she preached. It began to grow backyards in the 1960s, initially as a way to reduce costs, then as a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Ms. Gussow created another garden, which extended from the back of their house to the Hudson river.
She repeated the exhausting process in 2010, when, months after her 81st anniversary, a storm wave tore off the raised beds of the soil and buried all the vegetables that constituted the food supply all year round for less than two feet of water.
“I found myself quite numb-not hysterical as I expected,” she wrote on her website after having evaluated the damage. “I think it’s age.”
Alan Gussow died in 1997. Mrs. Gussow is survived by two sons, Adam and Seth, and a grandson.
In her book “Growing, Agel: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Legords” (2010), Ms. Gussow expressed the fervent hope that she would not remember as “a pretty little lady”.
“I posted on my babbler the comment that I found somewhere,” she wrote. “” The day I die, I want to have a black thumb where I hit it with a hammer and stripes on my hands of the pruning of roses. “”
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