When you have the opportunity to talk to someone as wise and honest as Joan Dye Gussow, you try your best to stretch out the time.
Joan, the matriarch of the organic, locavore, and small-farm movement who died this month at age 96, sustained us with her words.
The Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the former chair of its Nutrition Education Department, Joan was one of the first nutritionists to connect the strands of our food system to its impact on the Earth. While those around her debated the nutritional value of organic food, she reminded us not to lose sight of the importance of a food system that is “embedded in ecological responsibility.”
She created the nutritional ecology field, along with its namesake course, exposing her students to unflinching writing, then taking them out of the classroom and into her legendary, hard-earned garden to dig sweet potatoes and smell the soil.
As a volunteer member of the National Organic Standards Board (1996-2001) and The Cornucopia Institute’s Advisory Board, she sharply criticized the industrial food system, while pushing the organic food movement and the food system against corporate pressures and toward common sense.
She pressed for organic standards around food additives in organic food processing and fiercely protected regional food systems. The immense power of her opponents wasn’t lost on her, nor did it prevent her from slogging on. (Her garden, which she rebuilt after a hurricane wiped it out, embodied that unflagging spirit.)
In her last book, “Growing, Older,” she reminded us why we must keep pushing for something better. (Note the comma in that title. She was no slouch in the last chapters of her life — still teaching in the classroom until 2021!)
“We know so little about what really produces change in our world, especially when Nature is involved,” she wrote, words that she emphasized in what would be her last chat with us last year. “We know that human inventiveness can produce solutions as well as problems. To assume the worst will happen is almost as wicked as plunging ahead trying not to notice what is happening under our noses.”
We owe deep gratitude to Joan. May we continue to be in conversation with her.
For more on Joan’s life, read:
- Joan Dye Gussow, Pioneer of Eating Locally, Is Dead at 96 — New York Times obituary
- Remembering Joan Gussow — a collection of reflections in Civil Eats
