Joan Dye Gussow, nutritionist and educator who was often called the matriarch of the food movement “EAT at the local level, thinks globally, died on Friday in his home in Piermont, New York, in the County of Rockland. He was 96 years old.
His death, by congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, associate professor of nutritional education at Teacher College, University of Columbia, where Mrs. Gussow, a professor emeritus, had taught for over half a century.
Mrs. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between agricultural practices and consumer health. His book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thoughts of writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and others.
“Nutrition is designed as the science of what happens to food once he enters our bodies – as Joan said,” what happens after the swallow, “said Mrs. Koch in an interview.
But Mrs. Gussow has irra the swallow. “His concern was of all the things that had to happen for us to get our food,” said Mrs. Koch. “He was seeing the general picture of food problems and sustainability.”
Mrs. Gussow, an tireless gardener and a tank for the Gardens of the Community, began to deploy the “Local Food” phrase after examining the statistics on the drop in the number of farmers in the United States. (Agricultural and Ranch families constituted less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)
As Mrs. Gussow saw him, the disappearance of the farms meant that consumers did not know how their food was grown – and, more critically, it would not know how their food should be cultivated. “He said:” We have to make sure to keep farms in order to have this knowledge, “said Mrs. Koch.
Marion Nestlé, a nutritionist and supporter of public health, said that Mrs. Gussow “was enormously in advance of her times”, adding, “every time I thought I was on something and that I reduced new land and see something that no one had seen before, I would have discovered that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”
“He was a thinker of food systems before someone knew what a food system was,” said Mrs. Nestlé, referring to the process of production and consumption of food, including economic, environmental and health effects. “What he made fun of was that they could not understand why people eat how they do and why nutrition works as it does unless you understand how agricultural production works. He was a deep thinker. “
Mrs. Gussow was not a person who moves away from a food fight. He spoke of energy consumption, pollution, obesity and diabetes while real prices were paying for what they consumed at a time when this point of view did not win friends or influenced people. It was labeled “A Maverick Crank”, as he observed a New York Times profile in 2010.
But Mrs. Gussow’s gainard later became Gospel.
“Joan was one of my most important teachers when I decided to get to know the food system”, wrote Mr. Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “in defense of food: a mangiatore manifesto”, wrote in one and -mail. “When I asked her what nutritional advice your years of research came, she said, very simply,” eat food “.”
“After a slight processing”, Pollan continued, “this has become the core of my answer to the apparently very complicated question about what people should eat if they are worried about their health: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” “(That answer also appeared in the opening lines of” in defense of food “.)
Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in Alhambra, California, Chester and M. Joyce (Fisher) Dye. His father was a civil engineer.
After graduating from Pomona College in 1950, she moved to New York City, where she spent seven years as a researcher at the Time magazine. In 1956, he married Alan M. Gussow, painter and conservationist.
Mrs. Gussow made a disturbing observation when she and her husband, who had recently become parents, moved to the suburbs in the early 60s and began shopping in local food stores. “You know,” he said in an interview years later, “we had gone from 800 items to 18,000 items in the supermarket, and they were mostly garbage”.
Mrs. Gussow returned to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University. In 1972 he published the article “Couternutritional messages of television announcements aimed at children” in the Journal of Nutrition Education. His research has shown that 82 percent of advertising commercials broadcast during several Saturday mornings was for food, most of it suspects nutritionally.
Previously he had testified a congress committee on the subject. Useless, as it was discovered.
But in a 2011 interview published on Civil Eats, a news site focused on American Food System, Mrs. Gussow indicated at least small parts of progress.
“I must say that, compared to the reception that my ideas have obtained 30 years ago, the reception they are receiving now is quite surprising,” he said. “I am excited to see the type of things that are happening in Brooklyn, for example. People are massacring meat, breeding chicken. “But, he added,” whether or not there is the change of sea in the entire system is so difficult to judge “.
To tell the truth, Mrs. Gussow practiced what she preached. He started cultivating products in the courtyard in the 1960s, initially as a way to cut costs and then as a lifestyle. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Mrs. Gussow established another garden, which extended from the back of their home to the Hudson river.
He repeated the exhausting process in 2010, when, months after his 81st birthday, a wave of storm torn the beds raised from the ground and buried all the vegetables that constituted the supply of food throughout the year of the family under two water feet.
“I found myself insensitive enough – not hysterical as I could have expected,” he wrote on his website after evaluating the damage. “I think it’s age.”
Alan Gussow died in 1997. Mrs. Gussow survived two children, Adam and Seth and a grandson.
In his book “Growing, Old: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Ortables” (2010), Mrs. Gussow expressed the fervent hope that was not remembered as “a nice old lady”.
“I published on my bulletin board the comment I found somewhere,” he wrote. “‘The day I die, I want to have a black thumb from where I hit him with a hammer and scratches on his hands from pruning the roses.’