Joan Dye Gussow, pioneer of eating locally, dies at 96

Boston Globe

12-03-2025

'Nutrition is thought of as the science of what happens to food once it gets in our bodies — as Joan put it, 'What happens after the swallow,'' Koch said in an interview.
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But Dr. Gussow beamed her gimlet-eyed attention on what happens before the swallow. 'Her concern was with all the things that have to happen for us to get our food,' Koch said. 'She was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.'
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Dr. Gussow, an indefatigable gardener and a tub-thumper for community gardens, began deploying the phrase 'local food' after reviewing the statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families made up less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)
As Dr. Gussow saw it, the disappearance of farms meant that consumers wouldn't know how their food is grown and, more critically, wouldn't know how their food should be grown. 'She said, 'We need to make sure we keep farms around so we have that knowledge,'' Koch said.
Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said Dr. Gussow 'was enormously ahead of her time,' adding, 'Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I'd find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.'
Dr. Gussow was not one to shy away from a food fight. She talked about energy use, pollution, obesity, and diabetes as the true price consumers were paying for what they consumed at a time when this point of view did not win friends or influence people. She was labeled 'a maverick crank,' as a New York Times profile noted in 2010.
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But her gainsaying later became gospel.
"Joan was one of my most important teachers when I set out to learn about the food system," Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto," wrote in an email. "When I asked her what nutrition advice her years of research came down to, she said, very simply, 'Eat food.'"
"After a slight elaboration," Pollan added, "this became the core of my answer to the supposedly very complicated question about what people should eat if they are concerned about their health: 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'" (That answer also appeared in the opening lines of "In Defense of Food.")
Joan Dye was born Oct. 4, 1928, in Alhambra, Calif., 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 Alan M. Gussow, a painter and conservationist.
Dr. Gussow made a disquieting observation when she and her husband, who had recently become parents, moved to the suburbs in the early 1960s and began shopping at the local grocery stores. 'You know,' she said in an interview years later, 'we'd gone from 800 items to 18,000 items in the supermarket, and they were mostly junk.'
She went back to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972, she published the article 'Counternutritional Messages of TV Ads Aimed at Children' in the Journal of Nutrition Education. Her research showed that 82 percent of the commercials that aired over the course of several Saturday mornings were for food — most of it nutritionally suspect.
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She had earlier testified to a congressional committee on the subject. Futilely, as it turned out.
But in a 2011 interview posted on Civil Eats, a news site focused on the American food system, she pointed to at least small portions of progress.
"I must say that compared to the reception my ideas got 30 years ago, it's quite astonishing the reception they're getting now," she said. "I am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat, raising chicken." But, she added, "whether or not there's going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge."
Dr. Gussow practiced what she preached. She began growing backyard produce in the 1960s, initially as a way to cut costs and then as a way of life. When she and her husband relocated to Piermont in 1995, she established another garden, one that extended from the back of their house down to the Hudson River.
She repeated the grueling process in 2010, when, months after her 81st birthday, a storm surge ripped the raised beds out of the ground and buried all the vegetables that made up the family's year-round food supply under 2 feet of water.
'I found myself quite numb — not hysterical as I might have expected,' she wrote on her website after assessing the damage. 'I think it's age.'
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Alan Gussow died in 1997. Joan Dye Gussow leaves two sons, Adam and Seth, and a grandson.
In her book 'Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables' (2010), Dr. Gussow expressed the fervent hope that she would not be remembered as 'a cute little old lady.'
"I have posted on my bulletin board the comment I found somewhere," she wrote. "'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.'"
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