Joan Dye Gassau, a nutritionist and educator known as the patriarch of the food movement “dining locally and thinking globally,” passed away Friday at his home in Piermont, New York, in Rockland County. She was 96 years old.
Her death from congestive heart failure was announced by Pamela A. Koch, an associate professor of nutrition education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Gussow was one of the first in her field to highlight the relationship between agricultural practices and consumer health. Her book, The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology (1978), influenced the ideas of writers, including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.
“Nutrition is thought to be the science of what happens to food when it enters our bodies. As Joan said, 'What happens after the swallows?'” Koch said in an interview.
However, Gussow wakes up her Gimlet about what will happen before the swallows. “Her concern was about everything that has to happen to us to get our food,” Koch said. “She was about looking at the whole picture of food issues and sustainability.”
Gussow, an insatiable gardener and a sumper in a community garden tub, began rolling out the phrase “local food” after reviewing statistics on the decline in US farmers. (Farm and ranch families were less than 5% of the population in 1970 and less than 2% of the population in 2023.)
As Gussow saw, the disappearance of the farm meant that consumers didn't know how their food was growing. And more critically, they don't know how to grow their food. “She said, 'We have that knowledge, so we need to maintain the farm,'” Koch said.
Nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle said that Gussow was “a lot ahead of her time,” saying, “I rode something and broke new ground and every time I saw something no one had ever seen, I learned that Jaune had written about it 10 years ago.”
“Before she learned what the food system was, she was a food systems thinker,” Nestlé mentioned the food production and consumption processes, including economic, environmental and health effects. “What she found was that she couldn't understand why people eat their own way and why agricultural production works. She was a deep thinker.”
Mr. Gasso was not one to move away from the food fight. She spoke about energy use, pollution, obesity and diabetes as consumers paid for what they consumed when this perspective didn't win friends or affect people. She was labelled “Maverick Crank” in 2010 as a profile in The New York Times.
However, Gusso's profits later became the gospel.
“When I set out to learn about the food system, Joan was one of my most important teachers,” wrote Polan, author of “Omnivore Dilemma” and “Food Defense: The Manifesto of Eaters,” in an email. “When I asked her for years of research advice, she said very simply, “eat food.” ”
“After a slight elaboration,” continued Polan. Not too many. Mainly plants” (the answer also appeared in the opening line of “Food Defense.”)
Joan Dye was born on October 4, 1928 in the Alhambra, California to 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 spent seven years as a researcher at Time Magazine. In 1956 she married painter and protectionist Alan M. Gussow.
Gassau made volatile observations when her husband and husband, who recently became parents, moved to the suburbs in the early 1960s and began shopping at a local grocery store. “You know,” she said in an interview, “We went from 800 items to 18,000 items in the supermarket, and most were junk.”
Gussow returned to school in 1969 to earn his PhD in Nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972, she published an article in the Journal of Nutrition Education, titled “Choosing Messages in Television Advertisements for Children.” Her research showed that 82% of commercials aired on Saturday mornings were for food.
She had previously testified to a Congressional Committee on the subject. It's useless as it turns out.
But in a 2011 interview posted on Civil Eats, a news site focusing on the American food system, Gussow pointed out at least a small part of the advancement.
“I have to say that the receptions they are getting now compared to the receptions that my ideas were obtained 30 years ago are very surprising,” she said. “I'm excited to see the kind of thing going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are slaughtering meat and raising chickens. But she added, “It's very difficult to tell whether there's a oceanic change in the entire system or not.”
Certainly, Gusso did what she preached. She began growing backyard produce in the 1960s. Initially, it is a way to reduce costs and a way of life. When she and her husband moved to Piermont in 1995, Gussow founded another garden.
She went through a rigorous process in 2010. Then, months after her 81st birthday, the storm surge ripped up beds off the ground, filling all the vegetables that make up the family's year-round food supply under two feet of water.
“I was pretty paralyzed, not the hysterical I might have expected,” she wrote on her website after assessing the damages. “I think it's age.”
Alan Gussou passed away in 1997. Ms. Gussou was survived by two sons and grandchildren, Adam and Seth.
In her book Growth, Old: The Chronicles of Death, Life, and Vegetables (2010), Gusso expressed her passionate hope that she would not be remembered as a “cute little old lady.”
“I posted a comment I found somewhere on the message board,” she wrote. “The day I died, I want to hold a black thumb from where I hit it with a hammer and scratch on my hand by pruning the rose.”
