Joan Dye Gussow, Food Pioneer locally, is dead at the age of 96

Joan Dye Gussow, a dietitian and teacher, who was often called the Matriarch of the “Eat locally, think globally” movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, Recent York in Rockland. She was 96 years elderly.

Her death, subject to heart, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, a professor of nutritional education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she taught Mrs. Gussow, a retired professor, professor, taught for over half a century.

Mrs. Gussow was one of the first in her field that emphasizes the connections between agricultural practices and consumer health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of writers, including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.

“Nutrition is considered to be science about what happens to food when it appears in our bodies – as Joan put it,” what happens after swallowing, “said Mrs. Koch in an interview.

But Mrs. Gussow beaming her gimlet about what was happening earlier Swallow. “Her concern concerned all things that must happen to get food,” said Mrs. Koch. “She walked about a great picture of food related problems and sustainable development.”

Mrs. Gussow, a tireless gardener and rethinking of rubber for social gardens, began to arrange the expression “local food” after reviewing statistics regarding the falling number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families accounted for less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023)

As Gussow saw it, the disappearance of farms meant that consumers would not know how their food was grown – and, more critically, they would not know how their food should be grown. “She said:” We must make sure that we are holding the farms so that we have this knowledge, “said Mrs. Koch.

Marion Nestle, a dietitian and lawyer for public health, said that Mrs. Gussow “was extremely ahead of her time”, adding: “Every time I thought I had something and breaking the novel area and I see something that no one had seen before, I learned that Joan wrote about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a thinker of food systems before anyone finds out what the food system is,” Nestle said, referring to the process of food production and consumption, including economic, environmental and health effects. “She caught that you couldn’t understand why people eat as they do and why nutrition works as if you don’t understand how agriculture production works. She was a deep thinker. “

Mrs. Gussow was not avoiding the fight against food. She talked about energy consumption, pollution, obesity and diabetes, because the real price consumers paid for what they consumed at a time when this point of view did not gain friends or influenced people. It was marked as “Maverick Crank” as the Recent York Times profile recorded in 2010.

But the later profits of Mrs. Gussow became the Gospel.

“Joan was one of my most crucial teachers when I decided to learn about the food system,” wrote Pollan, author of “Omnivore Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: An Manifesto’s Manifesto”, We -Mail. “When I asked her to what nutrition advice they had, she said, just” eat food “.

“After a slight study,” continued Mr. Pollan – “This became the basis for my answer to the allegedly very complicated question about what people should eat if they are worried about their health:” eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants.

Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in Alhambra, California, Chester and M. Joyce (Fisher) Dye. Her father was a construction engineer.

After graduating from Pomon College in 1950, she moved to Recent York, where she spent seven years as a researcher in Time. In 1956, she married Alan M. Gussow, a painter and ecologist.

Mrs. Gussow made disturbing observation when she and her husband, who recently became parents, moved to the suburbs in the early 1960s and began shopping in local grocery stores. “You know,” she said in an interview after years, “we went from 800 positions to 18,000 positions in the supermarket, and they were mainly garbage.”

Mrs. Gussow returned to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University. In 1972, she published the article “Control messages of television advertisements addressed to children” at the Journal of Nutrition Education. Her studies have shown that 82 percent of advertisements emitted during a few Saturday mornings concerned food – most suspects of nutrition.

Earlier, she testified the Congress Committee on this subject. Unexpectedly, as it turned out.

But in an interview with 2011 published in Civil Eats, the information side focused on the American food system, Mrs. Gussow pointed to at least a miniature part of progress.

“I must say that compared to the acceptance my ideas got 30 years ago, it is quite an amazing party that they now receive,” she said. “I am excited, seeing, for example, the types of things that take place in Brooklyn. People slaughter meat, bring up chicken. She added, however, “whether the sea change in the whole system is so tough to evaluate.”

Of course, Mrs. Gussow practiced what she proclaimed. In the 1960s, she began to grow home products, initially as a way to reduce costs, and then as a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Mrs. Gussow founded another garden that stretched from the back of their house to the Hudson River.

She repeated the exhaustive trial in 2010, when a few months after her 81st birthday she ripped the raised beds rapidly and buried all the vegetables, which constituted all -year food supplies in the family under two feet of water.

“I found myself quite numb – not hysterical, as I could expect,” she wrote on her website after assessing the damage. “I think it’s age.”

Alan Gussow died in 1997. Mrs. Gussow survived two sons, Adam and Seth and grandson.

In his book “Growing, older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables” (2010), Mrs. Gussow expressed the ardent hope that she would not be remembered as “a cute, elderly lady”.

“I published on the notice board that I found somewhere,” she wrote. “” On the day I die, I want to have a black thumb, from where I hit him with a hammer and outlined in my hands from pruning roses. “