Nutritionist and educator Joan Dye Gussow, commonly known as the patriarch of the “local, global treatment” food movement, died Friday at his home in Piermount, New York. She is 96 years old.
Her death was congestive heart failure, announced by Pamela A. Koch, associate professor of Nutrition at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Ms. Gusso is one of the first in her field to emphasize the link between agricultural practices and consumer health. Her book Feeding Network: Problems of Nutrition Ecology (1978) influenced the thoughts of writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and others.
“Nutrition is considered the science once food enters our body, as Joan said, 'what happens after swallowing,'” Ms. Koch said in an interview.
But Ms. Gussow swallow. “She cares about everything we want to get food,” Ms. Koch said. “She is seeing the big picture of food problems and sustainability.”
Ms. Gussow, an unbearable gardener and bathtub for community gardens, began deploying the term “local food” after reviewing statistics on the decline in the number of farmers in the United States. (In 1970, less than 5% of the population had farm and ranch households and less than 2% of the population in 2023.)
As Gussow saw, the disappearance of the farm means that consumers won’t know how their food is grown—and more importantly, they don’t know how their food should be grown. Ms Koch said: “She said, ‘We need to make sure we raise the farm so that we have that knowledge.’
Nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle said Ms. Gussow “was far ahead of her time before her time, and whenever I thought I was doing something, breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I would find Joan wrote about it 10 years ago.”
“She was a food system thinker until anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms Nestlé said. “What she attracted to is that unless you understand how agricultural production works, you don’t understand why people eat their own way and why nutrition works. She is a profound thinker.”
Ms. Gusso is not the one who avoids dietary struggles. She talks about energy use, pollution, obesity and diabetes because consumers pay for consumers when this view does not win friends or influence people’s opinions. She was labeled as the “Maverick Crank”, as the New York Times pointed out in 2010.
But Ms. Gussow's make-up became a gospel.
“Joan was one of the most important teachers when I started learning the food system,” Mr. Pollan, author of “The Dieter’s Diet” and “Defending Food: Diner’s Manifesto”, wrote in an email. “When I asked her about her nutritional advice, her years of research came down to 'eating food.'”
Mr Pollan continued: “After a thorough explanation, this became the core of my very complex question of what people should eat for their concern for health: ‘Eat food. Not much. Most are plants.” (The answer also appears at the beginning of “Defend food.”
Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in Alhambra, California, and was born in Chester and M. Joyce (Fisher) dye. Her father was a civil engineer.
After graduating from Pomona College in 1950, she moved to New York City, where she worked for Time magazine for seven years. In 1956, she married painter and conservationist Alan M. Gussow.
Ms. Gussow and her recently-been parents made disturbing observations when she moved to the suburbs in the early 1960s and began shopping at local grocery stores. “You know, we've gone from 800 items to 18,000 items in supermarkets, and they're mostly garbage,” she said in an interview a few years later.
Ms. Gussow returned to school in 1969 and received her PhD in Nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972, she published “Illegal Information on TV Advertisements for Children” in the Journal of Nutrition Education. Her research shows that 82% of commercials aired on several Saturday mornings were food-providing, most of which were nutritional suspects.
She had testified to the Congressional Committee earlier on the subject. In vain, it turns out.
But in a 2011 interview on civil diet, the news website focused on the U.S. food system, Ms. Gusov noted that at least a small part of the progress.
“I have to say it's a surprise that this is the reception they're getting now compared to what I thought 30 years ago,” she said. “For example, I'm glad to see what's going on in Brooklyn. People are slaughtering meat, feeding chicken.” But, she added, “Whether the ocean changes will happen in the entire system, it's so hard to tell.”
To be sure, Ms. Gusso practiced what she said. She began growing backyard produce in the 1960s, initially as a cost-cutting and then a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Ms. Gussow established another garden, one that stretched from the back of their house to the Hudson River.
She repeated the hard process in 2010, when, months after her 81st birthday, a storm surge ripped off the ground and buried all the vegetables that made up the family’s food supply throughout the year.
“I found myself numb – not the hysteria I might have expected,” she wrote on the website after evaluating the loss. “I think it's age.”
Alan Gussow died in 1997. Ms. Gussow has two sons, Adam and Seth, and a grandson.
In her book Growth, Age: Chronicles of Death, Life and Vegetables (2010), Ms. Gusov expressed hope that she would not be remembered as “a lovely little old lady”.
“I've posted a comment on the bulletin board that I found somewhere,” she wrote. “'The day I died, I wanted to hit it with a hammer, grab it from there, rub the rose.'”
