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Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who was often referred to as the matriarch of the \u201ceat locally, think globally\u201d food movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 96.<\/p>\n
Her death, from congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, an associate professor of nutrition education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where Ms. Gussow, a professor emeritus, had taught for more than half a century.<\/p>\n
Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers\u2019 health. Her book \u201cThe Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology\u201d (1978) influenced the thinking of writers including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.<\/p>\n
\u201cNutrition is thought of as the science of what happens to food once it gets in our bodies \u2014 as Joan put it, \u2018What happens after the swallow,\u2019\u201d Ms. Koch said in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But Ms. Gussow beamed her gimlet-eyed attention on what happens before <\/em>the swallow. \u201cHer concern was with all the things that have to happen for us to get our food,\u201d Ms. Koch said. \u201cShe was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gussow, an indefatigable gardener and a tub-thumper for community gardens, began deploying the phrase \u201clocal food\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As Ms. Gussow saw it, the disappearance of farms meant that consumers wouldn\u2019t know how their food is grown \u2014 and, more critically, wouldn\u2019t know how their food should be grown. \u201cShe said, \u2018We need to make sure we keep farms around so we have that knowledge,\u2019\u201d Ms. Koch said.<\/p>\n Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow \u201cwas enormously ahead of her time,\u201d adding, \u201cEvery time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I\u2019d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShe was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,\u201d Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. \u201cWhat she caught on to was that you couldn\u2019t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. 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 \u201ca maverick crank,\u201d as a New York Times profile<\/a> noted in 2010.<\/p>\n But Ms. Gussow\u2019s gainsaying later became gospel.<\/p>\n \u201cJoan was one of my most important teachers when I set out to learn about the food system,\u201d Mr. Pollan, the author of \u201cThe Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma\u201d and \u201cIn Defense of Food: An Eater\u2019s Manifesto,\u201d wrote in an email. \u201cWhen I asked her what nutrition advice her years of research came down to, she said, very simply, \u2018Eat food.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAfter a slight elaboration,\u201d Mr. Pollan continued, \u201cthis became the core of my answer to the supposedly very complicated question about what people should eat if they are concerned about their health: \u2018Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.\u2019\u201d (That answer also appeared in the opening lines of \u201cIn Defense of Food.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Joan Dye was born on Oct. 4, 1928, in Alhambra, Calif., to Chester and M. Joyce (Fisher) Dye. Her father was a civil engineer.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Ms. 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. \u201cYou know,\u201d she said in an interview years later, \u201cwe\u2019d gone from 800 items to 18,000 items in the supermarket, and they were mostly junk.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gussow went back to school in 1969 and received a doctorate in nutrition from Columbia University. In 1972 she published the article \u201cCounternutritional Messages of TV Ads Aimed at Children\u201d 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 \u2014 most of it nutritionally suspect.<\/p>\n She had earlier testified to a congressional committee on the subject. Futilely, as it turned out.<\/p>\n But in a 2011 interview posted on Civil Eats, a news site focused on the American food system, Ms. Gussow pointed to at least small portions of progress.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI must say that compared to the reception my ideas got 30 years ago, it\u2019s quite astonishing the reception they\u2019re getting now,\u201d she said. \u201cI am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat, raising chicken.\u201d But, she added, \u201cwhether or not there\u2019s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To be sure, Ms. 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, Ms. Gussow established another garden, one that extended from the back of their house down to the Hudson River.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s year-round food supply under two feet of water.<\/p>\n \u201cI found myself quite numb \u2014 not hysterical as I might have expected,\u201d she wrote on her website after assessing the damage. \u201cI think it\u2019s age.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Alan Gussow died in 1997. Ms. Gussow is survived by two sons, Adam and Seth, and a grandson.<\/p>\n In her book \u201cGrowing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables\u201d (2010), Ms. Gussow expressed the fervent hope that she would not be remembered as \u201ca cute little old lady.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have posted on my bulletin board the comment I found somewhere,\u201d she wrote. \u201c\u2018The 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.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n