Joan Dye Gussow, Pioneer of Eating Locally, Is Dead at 96

Science|Joan Dye Gussow, Pioneer of Eating Locally, Is Dead at 96

Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who was often referred to as the matriarch of the “eat locally, think globally” food movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, NY., in Rockland County. She was 96.

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.

Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of writers including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.

“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,’” Ms. Koch said in an interview.

But Ms. 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,” Ms. Koch said. “She was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.”

Ms. 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.)