Remembering Joan Gussow
Gussow helped us understand that buying locally grown, seasonal food (and raising it ourselves, if possible) connected us to the health of the land, and to our own health, too. And because of her, we began to understand the deleterious impacts of the industrialized food system—among them depleted soil, poisoned water, and metabolic disease. She […]
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Joan Dye Gussow, who died last Friday at age 96, was a fiercely independent thinker and food-system visionary whose ideas caught on and rippled outward. Starting in the 1970s, through her groundbreaking nutritional ecology class at Teachers College within Columbia University, and through books like The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, she transformed our view of food from something enjoyed at the end of a fork to the entire system that created the mouthful.
Photo credit: Randy Harris, courtesy of Chelsea Green Publishing
Gussow helped us understand that buying locally grown, seasonal food (and raising it ourselves, if possible) connected us to the health of the land, and to our own health, too. And because of her, we began to understand the deleterious impacts of the industrialized food system—among them depleted soil, poisoned water, and metabolic disease.
She railed at politicians for setting back progress and, as she told us in an interview, “You have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out there.”
In person, Gussow was formidable and funny, speaking her brilliant mind with candor, urging us to see what was going on and to never stop asking hard questions. Luckily, many of us have heeded her call, and in our work and our lives, we continue the conversation she began.
We asked some of Gussow’s many fans to celebrate and remember her with us. For those who would like to share memories or photos through this link, created by her friend Pam Koch, please do so.
Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Family Meal at Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns
To Joan, the professor: You changed the way we view a single strawberry and taught us to trust cows more than chemists.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the writer: Political or personal, your prose was always beautiful and unflinching.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the nutritionist: You proved that it is not merely safe, but sensible (and not merely sensible, but imperative) to keep slathering butter on all those potatoes.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the activist: On health food zealots, always a baffling irritation for you, you delivered a consistent message: Ignore them. Your vitality was daily proof of that simple wisdom.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the botanist: We valued your pawpaws as much as your raspberries. Your green thumb lifted our blue moods.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the cook and critic: You cooked up what you dug. For agribusiness adversaries, you cooked up trouble.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
To Joan, the mother: You have raised all these issues and along the way you’ve raised us, too. Here’s hoping we will do you proud.
For this and many other things, Joan, we salute you.
And to Joan, the hedonist: Food was your medium, but your message was a philosophy of life. You taught us something more than nutrition and agriculture—you taught us how to eat, to indulge in pleasure by way of responsibility. Thank you.
Ann Cooper, chef and founder of the Chef Ann Foundation
“Joan Gussow was truly an OG of the sustainable/
organic food movement, and an amazing thinker and educator.”
Joan Gussow was truly an OG of the sustainable/organic food movement, and an amazing thinker and educator. She spoke at the 1996 Chefs Collaborative Retreat and told the group that some “food” should just not be organic. “An organic gummy bear or an organic Twinkie, organic Eggo Toaster Waffles . . . they just shouldn’t be organic.”
I was so inspired by her idea that we shouldn’t have organic junk food that it shaped many of my thoughts on sustainability. Joan was instrumental in some of my thinking for my book Bitter Harvest, and when I went to the Ross School to build a healthy, nutritious, delicious school food program, Joan graciously gave of her time and energy to teach and educate our team. I will be forever grateful for all she did for food systems and sustainability.
Leslie Hatfield with Joan Gussow. Photo courtesy of Hatfield.
Leslie Hatfield, Senior Partnership and Outreach Advisor at GRACE Communications Foundation
Joan was brilliant, no question, but what drew me to her was her fierce honesty. Whether writing about unchecked corporate power’s impacts on diets, or her marriage and subsequent widowhood, she asked hard questions and didn’t flinch in laying out the answers. She inspired me, on both personal and professional levels, to live a more honest and authentic life.
Elizabeth Henderson, farmer and co-chair, Interstate Council policy committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association
I came to know Joan through my work as an organic farmer and as one of the first to organize a CSA [community supported agriculture system]. I was thrilled when she agreed to write the foreword to my 2000 book Sharing the Harvest. The first edition came out in 1998, when we estimated that there were about 1,000 CSAs in the U.S. By the second edition, in 2007, that number had more than doubled, and there may be as many as 7,000 today. As a pioneering advocate of buying from local organic farms, Joan instantly grasped the significance of CSAs.
In her foreword, Joan wrote:
“Across this country, a movement is spreading that acknowledges a long-ignored reality: Most of what we pay for our food goes to companies that transport, process, and market what comes off the farms, not to farmers themselves. The people who actually grow food don’t get paid enough to keep on doing it. If we hope to keep on eating, however, we need to keep farmers in business; and if we want to keep farmers in business, it’s time for all of us, ordinary citizens and policy makers alike, to begin learning how that might be done. Sharing the Harvest is a great place to start.”
Joan’s words are as urgent today as when she wrote them 28 years ago. Family-scale farms continue to go out of business, and the United States Department of Agriculture just cancelled the grant that would have enabled the CSA Innovation Network, a network of CSA networks all over the country, to support more diverse farms in creating CSAs.
I will be eternally grateful to Joan for her encouragement to me as a farmer and as a writer, and for transforming the discipline of nutrition from the reductionist academic analysis of the food on our plates into a training program for active participants in the international movement to wrest power over food from corporate industrial domination and return it to the people who eat, and do the hard and joyous work of growing healthy, nutritious food.
Photo credit: Susan Frieman, courtesy of Chelsea Green Publishing
Pamela Koch, Mary Swarz Rose associate professor of nutrition and education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Joan taught her transformative course, Nutritional Ecology, in the Program in Nutrition at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1970 to 2021. I taught with her from 2012 to 2021. Each week students received a 50–60 page packet of readings on a topic such as the “true cost (i.e., the environmental, health, and social cost) of food.” Students wrote a one-page reflection paper on the readings, which could be written as a letter to a friend. My comments are a reflection letter to you, Joan.
Dear Joan, I miss your wit, your wisdom, and how we could reflect on an old reading, such as your 1980 piece “What corporations have done to our food,” and see something totally new in today’s context. You described our industrial food system as “insane” and “absurd.” You have taught me to always speak the truth and think critically.
Case in point: The fertilizers and pesticides used on farms have to pollute our rivers, oceans, and drinking water. How could they not? The ability to ask the tough questions is what we can all do to carry your torch. This gives me hope that we can heal our ecosystem, support public health, reduce food-related chronic diseases, and treat everyone who works all along the food chain fairly and justly. Because of you, Joan, I believe we will have a better food future. We need your hope, Joan, now, more than ever.
Ellie Krieger, MS RDN, Food Network and PBS show host and James Beard award-winning cookbook author
I remember the feeling of having my mind blown open by Joan Dye Gussow’s teaching. It was like suddenly seeing in three dimensions when I had only been seeing in two before. Understanding that nutrition is much more than just nutrients–that [it] is agriculture, politics, the environment, and more–shaped my thinking about food and the work I do to this day. Thank you, Joan, for your brilliance, bravery, persistence, and for leading by example. I consider myself a product of the big, robust garden you cultivated.
Anna Lappé, author and executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food
Joan was a singular, uncompromising voice for organic and local food. I’ll always appreciate her generosity of spirit as a teacher, training countless students through her courses at Columbia Teachers College and opening her door to me personally as she took the time to help me understand food systems and the power of organic practices.
I’ll never forget interviewing her at her home in upstate New York for Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. While we looked out at her overflowing vegetable garden that stretched to the waters of the Hudson River, Joan shared her food philosophy, including turning me onto her seminal essay about a hypothetical organic Twinkie.
While serving on the National Organic Standards Board, she had penned, “Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?” Her answer was yes. One day, a Twinkie could very well be certified organic if 95 percent of its ingredients were. But, she was quick to note, it would not be healthy—nor would it reflect her vision of a food system defined by local, healthy, whole foods and not highly processed ones.
I loved the last words of her New York Times obituary, which sounded every bit like the Joan I had been inspired by for years: “The day I die, I want to have a black thumb from where I hit it with a hammer and scratches on my hands from pruning the roses.”
Kate MacKenzie, Executive Director of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Food Policy
Joan Gussow has influenced my professional life more than any other. Twenty-five years ago, I started in the public health nutrition program at Teachers College, with a BS degree in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell. I often say that at Cornell, I learned everything about food after you swallow it, and everything about food before you eat it at TC, from Joan.
“Perhaps now more than ever, we have the responsibility of carrying her legacy forward, to meaningfully connect to real food for the health of our people and our environment.”
It was in her classes that I was introduced to topics like the corporate consolidation of the food system (or to even consider the words “food system”), the limits to population growth, how to feed the world, agricultural inputs like pesticides and organic practices, and the concepts of sustainability and local food.
I remember one class when she was lecturing about the number of food products on grocery store shelves, and how over time, people were made to think there was just no more time to cook. Her simple response: that we have always had 24 hours in the day, and it’s the power of marketing and industry to convince us otherwise. These issues made me deeply curious and desirous to effectuate changing the food system.
I’ve been doing that ever since graduating and I have met extraordinary leaders and visionaries throughout the U.S. and beyond. Many of those people have also been students of Joan’s. Perhaps now more than ever, we have the responsibility of carrying her legacy forward, to meaningfully connect to real food for the health of our people and our environment.
Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health emerita, New York University
I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.
I am not alone in being inspired by her work. I have followed it with great admiration. Ahead of her time? Absolutely.
You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices? Try Joan’s “Who Pays the Piper,” from 1980.
You think food systems should be sustainable? See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.
Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit. I am beyond sad at her loss.
Raj Patel, author, activist, and research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin
Joan was so ahead of her time, I often wondered whether she thought the food movement revival a decade or two ago was just the history of the 1970s repeating, this time as farce. But she was always gracious, ready to celebrate the wins—and hurl imprecations at those who deserved them: the food industry, their shills, and the deer who ate from her garden. Recently, I re-read her classic lecture, “Women, Food, and the Survival of the Species,” plucked from the archives by Daniel Bowman Simon, and it reminded me of the abundance of her spirit, and the depth of our debt to her.
Michael Pollan, author, journalist
Joan was one of my first and most influential teachers when it came to understanding food and agriculture as a system. (The other is Marion Nestle.) Joan saw the politics in all sorts of places people had trouble spotting it, such as the field of nutrition. We first met in the 1990s at the Culinary Institute of America, at a conference about genetically modified crops. She was formidable, and though I don’t recall what she said, it galvanized the room with its penetrating clarity.
She was a master at connecting the dots, and the fact that most of us understand food and agriculture as a single system, linking policy, soil, nutrition, public health, and technology, owes in large part to the work Joan did.
But she was much more than a theorist; indeed, she walked the talk, growing much of her own food on an oft-flooded piece of land right on the Hudson–a beautiful but perilous spot I had the privilege of visiting a couple of times.
The phrase, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” owes at least two words to Joan. When I was researching In Defense of Food, I asked her to sum up what she had learned about how best to eat, and she didn’t miss a beat: “Eat food.” As in, real food, whole foods, unprocessed foods. I embroidered her message a bit, with “mostly plants” and “not too much” but the basic message—which is that we don’t and shouldn’t eat nutrients–was Joan’s. She was an inspiration.
Tom Philpott, senior research associate at the Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins University
Joan Dye Gussow has passed on, but her legacy and influence will live as long as we have ecosystems and natural resources worth defending. Like all of our best and brightest food-system intellectuals, Joan understood that humanity doesn’t exist separately from nature or ecology, but lives deeply embedded within them. We are as much a part of nature as the lion skulking the savanna, or the warbler winging it from the Adirondacks to the Caribbean islands for winter; it’s just that we exert much more influence over the ecosystems we touch.
Joan elegantly summed up this concept in the title of her 1978 book, The Feeding Web: Issues In Nutritional Ecology. “Nutritional ecology”: The idea neatly connects our sustenance with the landscapes that feed us and provide sinks for our waste. Professionally, academically, she was a nutritionist, a field that evolved over decades in tight collaboration with corporate food giants, and too often reduced nutrition to a list of essential vitamins and minerals—commodities that, once injected into highly processed food, the idea went, make a health-giving diet.
“Perhaps what I will remember most about Joan is the laughter, the caring, and the closeness we shared, sometimes verging on tears.”
Today, this ideology is finally unravelling under the weight of undeniable evidence. Joan rejected it more than a half century ago, and used her perch at Columbia University to launch broadsides against it.
By the time I met her in the late 2000s, Joan was a doyenne of the anti-industrial food movement, renowned for her advocacy in support of local and regional food systems, and for her legendary garden on the banks of the Hudson, not far from New York City. It meant a lot to hear her say she had read and appreciated my journalism work, and it was delightful to be able to tell her how much I had learned from her. She was a happy and inspiring warrior against the forces of industrial agriculture.
And damn it, she was right. Her vision of robust local and regional food networks, bolstered by flourishing small- and mid-scale farms and justly compensated farm labor, represents a beacon for a livable future in an increasingly dystopian age. In a 2011 Civil Eats interview, she allowed that “compared to the reception my ideas got 30 years ago, it’s quite astonishing the reception they’re getting now,” citing the extraordinary artisanal food scenes emerging in places like Brooklyn. But, she added, “whether or not there’s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge.”
Hard to judge, and harder still to achieve. It’s up to us, the generations she inspired, to make it so. I never managed to take her up on the invitation to visit her Hudson Valley garden. May it flourish in her memory forever. I still hope to see it someday.
Joan Dye Gussow with Urvashi Rangan. Photo courtesy of Rangan.
Urvashi Rangan, founding co-chair, Funders for Regenerative Agriculture (FORA) and chief science advisor, GRACE Communications Foundation
I had the immense pleasure of sharing in Joan’s professional and personal life. As a young scientist, I remember presenting to a nutrition conference and Joan was in the front row and asked many great questions. From then, I always knew to seek her professional opinion on the harms of industrial ag practices and the benefits of organic production. She then invited me to lecture in her classes and always wanted to know the latest goings-on in food politics.
Perhaps what I will remember most about Joan is the laughter, the caring, and the closeness we shared, sometimes verging on tears. I remember one conversation about gut microbiomes and people reseeding with poop from other people. We decided that Joan’s poop would be worth more than gold since her biome had only eaten organic food forever.
Despite the 40 years between us, I found Joan to be one of my closest and dear friends and one of the youngest people I have known. I remember leaving a conference in NYC together where she gave the keynote, and while we were driving home, she looked at me and said, “My God, Urvashi, there were some really old people there.” Joan wasn’t talking about age, but mindset (and she was so right).
And while she may have been the oldest person in the room, her mind and heart were youthful, yet wise. I used to tell her that when I grew up, I wanted to be just like her. She was a teacher until the end, in the classroom and out. I will miss her immensely and will cherish all of the times we had together.
Michael Sligh, founding chair, National Organic Standards Board
Joan was that rare breed of academic, activist, and farmer. She helped us bridge movements and she was always on the right side of the fight. Tough as nails and a heart of gold. She will be missed.
Kerry Trueman, sustainability advocate
Joan was a dear friend and mentor to me, as she was to so many people. I became a die-hard devotee of her work after reading her first memoir, This Organic Life. We became friends several decades ago when she gave a talk at The New School. After she spoke, she mingled with the attendees, and I was so excited at the prospect of meeting her that I transcended my shyness to tell her how she had inspired me to plant pawpaws in my yard. Joan, in her inimitable acerbic-yet-affectionate way, liked to say that I had “stalked” her. She once called me her “favorite beneficial pest,” which, coming from her, was a thrilling compliment.
What an honor it was to collaborate with her, to be a guest at so many memorable meals in her lovely home, to work side by side with her to restore her legendary garden after the Hudson River flooded it. The second time the river rose up to swallow her garden, she rose even higher, literally, by raising the soil level to accommodate the consequences of climate change. Her refusal to throw in the trowel in the wake of such destruction was quintessential Joan.
Her perseverance was just one of Joan’s many admirable traits, another being that she was not a purist. For her, eating locally meant being a regular at her local diner, regardless of how they sourced their eggs and bacon. How grateful I am to have known her.
Karen Washington with Joan Gassow. Photo courtesy of Washington.
Karen Washington, farmer, activist, and co-founder of Black Urban Growers
Joan was such a kind and loving person. Her first act of kindness was to invite me and my gardeners from the Bronx to come visit and have lunch. Many of them did not speak English, but were able to enjoy her company, her garden, and the food. She loved people and was willing to share her home with strangers.
We became close as board members of Just Food. Her knowledge and wisdom of the food system was incredible. She taught me to be courageous and not sit by and allow things to happen, but to challenge things that were hard. I loved her so much and will miss her, but I will carry a piece of her in my work to fight against injustice.
Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, founder of Chez Panisse and The Edible Schoolyard
Joan had a HUGE influence on my life and my thinking. “Eat locally, think globally” became my motto for Chez Panisse, and now for school food purchasing everywhere.
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