Posted Feb 19, 2011
Thirty-five years ago, Joan Dye Gussow realized that the food system in America was broken.
She was teaching a nutrition course at Columbia University which covered such topics as the limits to growth, the impact of advertising, and the relationship between people and food.
“I looked at all those issues and where we were headed. I realized that the implications of that course were that we were headed off a cliff and we had to do something about that. We were headed off a cliff in terms of the production of food,” Ms. Gussow said on the phone from her home on the Hudson River just north of New York City.
And so she began to teach and write and lecture about growing one’s own food and buying the rest from local farmers, especially those who do not use chemicals. Her ideas and her passion helped ignite what became the current red-hot interest in foods that are local, organic, and sustainable.
“I am now known officially as the matriarch of the movement. It’s pretty awful to be called the matriarch of anything,” the 82-year-old Ms. Gussow said.
On Sunday, she will be giving the keynote address at the 32nd annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association in Granville, Ohio.
The speech will be about “whether things are moving as they should be. The news is not terrific,” she said.
When she first began thinking about the food supply chain, Ms. Gussow was struck by the fact that the United States exported large amounts of food to countries like India and China, which have huge populations and widespread unemployment. American machine and chemical-based efficiency meant that very little labor was being used in this country to send food to nations with a large pool of idle laborers.
And Americans were consuming food from distant shores as well, and even distant parts of this country. And that unsettled her, too. In order truly to know about something, she determined, you have to live near it and be a part of it.
“I figured we had to have agriculture locally, and in order to keep the agriculture local we had to eat what the [local] farmers produced,” she said. “So we have to be willing to change our diets and not depend on things shipped from across the seas.
“I’ve been playing with that idea for 35 years, and I can tell you 35 years ago it was a big hit,” she said sarcastically. “It was like a piece of lead dropped into the ocean. Some of my students thought I was crazy.”
But she persevered, writing such books as This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader and Chicken Little Tomato Sauce: Who Will Produce Tomorrow’s Food?
And she practiced what she preached, growing vegetables in two long garden plots behind her house. She freezes what she can and plants hardy, winter vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, collard greens, and kale to get through the leaner months. She gets fruit from a few trees including “an apple tree with apples only a mother could love, but they’re very good — if you cut out the insects.”
And her meat, bread, and cheese come from upstate farmers as part of a Community Supported Agriculture arrangement, an increasingly popular way for consumers to purchase their food items straight from the farmers and artisans. The one treat she allows herself in the winter is to order a big box of grapefruit from Texas, which her grandmother used to get for her and which she now gets for her loved ones.
“Nature does not grow fruit in winter,” she said.
Now, in large part because of her efforts, “there is a huge change in the amount of interest in local [food]. It’s almost a fad, and I worry sometimes that it is a fad, and it will end. There has been a tremendous change in people’s awareness. There has been a tremendous spreading of the word, and not just on the coasts, but in the Midwest and the Ecological Farming Association.
“There is a tremendous change, but there is also a tremendous pushback. The people in power are in power because they have so much money. The Department of Agriculture just passed a bill eliminating restrictions on genetically engineered alfalfa. Now you can plant it anywhere. It is disheartening to see how the Department of Agriculture is overwhelmed by the powers that be. We have a congress that has been bought by them.”
The local food movement is growing, but it still remains upscale and out of reach for most people, she said. The efficiencies of conventional farming make it cheaper than organic farming, and one of the fundamentals of the local food movement is to ensure that the farmers and their laborers are paid a decent living, which makes organic foods even pricier.
“The truth is that the food at farmers’ markets is more expensive,” she said. “The poor can’t afford fresh produce, because they can get more food from junk than they buy in the store.”
“I’m fundamentally a person who’s optimistic, but I also think we have a tremendous fight ahead of us. I’m thrilled that we’ve come so far from where we started, but we have a long way to go.”
— Daniel Neman
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