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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 Swartz 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.
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