Joan Dye Gussow, pioneer of the local food, is dead with 96

Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator, who was often referred to as a matriarch of the food movement “Local Essen, Thinking”, died in her house in Piermont, NY, in Rockland County on Friday. She was 96.

Her death from heart failure was taught by Pamela A. Koch, an extraordinary professor of nutritional education at the teacher College of Columbia University, at which Ms. Gussow, an emeritus professor, has been taught for more than half a century.

Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her area to emphasize the connections between agricultural practices and the health of consumers. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of the writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and others.

“Nutrition is viewed as science of what happens to food as soon as it comes in our body – as Joan put it,” what happens after the swallow, “said Ms. Koch in an interview.

But Ms. Gussow beamed her attention from the Gimlet eyes on what happens before the sip. “Your concern was with all the things that have to happen so that we get our food,” said Ms. Koch. “It was about seeing the overall picture of food and sustainability.”

Ms. Gussow, a tireless gardener and a tub farmer for community gardens, began to stop the expression “local food” after checking the statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families made up less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)

As Ms. Gussow saw it, the disappearance of farms meant that consumers would not know how their food is grown – and more critically do not know how their food should be grown. “She said,” We have to make sure that we keep farms nearby so that we have this knowledge, “said Ms. Koch.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and lawyer for public health, said that Ms. Gussow was “enormously ahead of her time” and added: “Every time I thought I was on something and broke new ways and saw something that nobody had seen before, I would find that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a thinker for food systems before someone knew what a food system was,” said Ms. Nestle, referring to the process of making and consuming food, including the economic, ecological and health effects. “What she caught was that you couldn't understand why people eat as they do and why nutrition works as they don't understand how agricultural production works. She was a profound thinker. “

Ms. Gussow was not one who shy away from a food struggle. She spoke about energy consumption, pollution, obesity and diabetes, as the actual price that consumers paid, for what they consumed, at a time when this point of view no friends won or influenced people. It was called “Maverick Crank” how a profile of the New York Times 2010 was found.

But Ms. Gussow's gainsaying later became a gospel.

“Joan was one of my most important teachers when I made my way to the food system,” wrote Mr. Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore's Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: A Eater's Manifest”, “wrote in an e -mail.” When I asked what nutritional advice was on her years of research, she said, very easy to eat “.”

“After a slight elaboration,” continued Mr. Pollan. Not too much. Mostly plants. '”(This answer also appeared in the opening lines of” To defend food “.)

Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in Alhambra, California, the son of 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 seven years as a researcher at Time Magazine. In 1956 she married Alan M. Gussow, a painter and conservationist.

Ms. Gussow watched when she and her husband, who had recently become a parents, moved to the suburbs in the early 1960s and began shopping in local grocery stores. “You know,” she said in an interview years later, “we had gone from 800 articles to 18,000 articles in the supermarket, and they were mostly garbage.”

Ms. Gussow went back to school in 1969 and did her doctorate in nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972 she published the article “Entrepreney News from TV ads for children” in the Journal of Nutrition Education. Her investigations showed that 82 percent of the commercials that were broadcast over several Saturday morning were for food – most of the IT suspects.

She had previously testified to a congress committee on this topic. In vain, as it turned out.

In a 2011 interview, which via Civil Eats, a news site that focused on the American food system, Ms. Gussow pointed to at least small parts of progress.

“I have to say that my ideas compared to the reception 30 years ago is the reception you are getting now amazing,” she said. “I look forward to the kind of things that are going to go in Brooklyn, for example. People slaughter meat and breed chicken. “But she added” whether it is so difficult to assess or not whether it is a change in the sea. “

Of course, Ms. Gussow practiced what preached. In the 1960s it started growing garden products, initially as a possibility, the costs and then as a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Ms. Gussow founded another garden that stretched from the back of her house to Hudson River.

She repeated the exhausting process in 2010 when a storm surge months after her 81st birthday tore the increased beds out of the ground and buried the entire vegetables that the family's food supply made under two foot water.

“I was pretty deaf – not hysterical, as I might have expected,” she wrote on her website after evaluating the damage. “I think it's old.”

Alan Gussow died in 1997. Ms. Gussow is survived by two sons Adam and Seth and a grandson.

In her book “Growth, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables” (2010), Ms. Gussow expressed a freath hope that she would not be remembered as a “sweet little old lady”.

“I posted the comment in my Bulletin board that I found somewhere,” she wrote. “'On the day I die, I would like to have a black thumb from which I press it on my hands with a hammer and a scratch because I cropped the roses.'”