Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who is often referred to as the Orhist of the “Eat Locally, Think Globally” movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, New York at the Rockland County. He was 96 years old.
Her death, from congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, Associate Professor of Nutrition at College Teachers, Columbia University, where Mrs Gussow, a peer professor, had taught for more than half a century.
Mrs Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the links between agricultural practices and consumer health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Themes in Nutrition Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of the writers such as Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.
“Nutrition is regarded as the science of what is happening with food as soon as it enters our bodies – as Joan put it,” what happens after the swallow, “Mrs Koch said in an interview.
But Ms. Gussow radiated her attention to a look at what happens before The swallow. “Her concern was with all the things that need to happen to get our food,” Ms Koch said. “It was to see the big picture of food problems and sustainability.”
Ms Gussow, an indefinite gardener and a bathtub for Community Gardens, began developing the phrase “local food” after examining statistics on the reduced number of farmers in the United States. (Families of farm and farm constituted less than 5 % of the population in 1970 and less than 2 % of the population in 2023.)
As Ms Gussow saw, the disappearance of the holdings meant that consumers would not know how their food is cultivated – and, more critically, they would not know how their food should be cultivated. “He said,” We have to make sure we keep the farms around, so we have this knowledge, “Ms Koch said.
Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health lawyer, said that Ms Gussow “was extremely ahead of her time”, adding, “every time I thought I was on something and breaking new ground and seeing something that no one had seen before, I would learn that Joan had written 10 years ago.”
“He was a food systems thinker before someone knew what a food system was,” Ms Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including economics, environmental and health. “What he caught was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why the diet works the way it does if you do not understand how agricultural production works. It was a deep thinker.”
Ms Gussow was not the one who avoids a food race. He talked about energy use, pollution, obesity and diabetes, as real prices consume for what they consume at a time when this view has not gained friends or affect people. It was granted as “Maverick Crank”, as the New York Times profile noted in 2010.
But Ms. Gussow’s gainsaying later became the Gospel.
“Joan was one of my most important teachers when I went out to learn about the food system,” Mr. Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “about defending food: a manifesto of eating”, writes in an email. “When I asked her what tips on nutrition, the years of research ended up, she said,” you eat food “.
“After a slight treatment,” Mr Pollan continued, “this became the core of my answer to the so -called very complicated question about what people should eat if they are concerned about their health:” they eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. “”
Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928, in Alhambra, California, Chester and M. Joyce (Fisher) Dye. Her father was a civil engineer.
After graduating from Pomona College in 1950, he moved to New York, where he spent seven years as a researcher at Time Magazine. In 1956 he married Alan M. Gussow, Zografou and Conservator.
Ms Gussow made a worrying observation when she and her husband, who had recently become parents, moved to the outskirts in the early 1960s and began shopping at local grocery stores. “You know,” he said in an interview years later, “we had gone from 800 items to 18,000 objects in the supermarket, and they were mostly trash.”
Ms Gussow returned to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in the diet from the University of Columbia. In 1972 he published the article “Councils of TV ads that are addressed to children” in Journal of Nutrition Education magazine. Her research showed that 82 percent of ads that were shown during several mornings on Saturday was for food – most of the nutritional suspect.
He had lodged an earlier Congress committee on the matter. Eye, as it turned out.
But in a 2011 interview published in Civil Eats, a news site focused on the US food system, Ms Gussow pointed out at least small portions of progress.
“I have to say that compared to the reception that my ideas got 30 years ago, the reception they are getting now is amazing,” he said. “I am excited to see the kinds of things that are happening in Brooklyn, for example. People are a butcher shop, increasing chicken.” But he added, “whether there will be a change in the sea throughout the system is so difficult to judge.”
To be sure, Ms Gussow practiced what she preached. He began to cultivate the courtyard of the courtyard in the 1960s, initially as a way to reduce costs and then as a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Ms Gussow founded another garden, extending from the back of their home to the Hudson River.
It reiterated the exhausting process in 2010, when, months after its 81st birthday, a storm broke the raised beds from the ground and buried all the vegetables that were the family supply of food under two feet of water.
“I found myself enough numbness – not hysterical as I would expect,” she wrote on her website after the damage was evaluated. “I think it’s age.”
Alan Gussow died in 1997. Ms Gussow survives two sons, Adam and Seth and one grandson.
In her book “Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables” (2010), Ms. Gussow expressed the ardent hope that we would not remember “a cute little old woman”.
“I have published the comment I found somewhere in my bulletin,” he wrote. “On the day I die. I want to have a black thumb from where I hit it with a hammer and scratch in my hands from the pruning of roses.”
