Joan Gussow
Professor Emeritus
Teachers College, Columbia University
Dr. Joan Dye Gussow is Mary Swartz Rose Professor emerita and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where each fall she still teaches her course called Nutritional Ecology. She currently serves on the boards of Just Food, the Sustainability Fund, and the Frontera Farmer Foundation, and was, until recently a member of the Board of the Chefs Collaborative and of the Roots of Change Council. In her Piermont community she serves as a trustee on the village governing board.
During her career she has served in a number of capacities for various public, private, and governmental organizations, including chairing the Boards of the National Gardening Association, the Society for Nutrition Education, the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation, and Just Food, serving two terms on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences, a term on the FDA’s Food Advisory Committee and a term on the National Organic Standards Board.
She has also produced several books and a variety of articles on food-related topics. Her books include The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, The Nutrition Debate, and Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture. Her most recent book, based on the lessons learned from 30 years of working toward growing her own, is This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. It was published in 2001 by Chelsea Green Publishing Co. A 30-year advocate of relocalizing the food supply, Gussow lives, writes, and grows organic vegetables on the west bank of the Hudson River. She is at work on a new book.
The Revson year gave me a chance to see the parallels between the low-income communities I’ve worked in for so many years and a larger world in transition. It gave me an opportunity to explore what it means to work as an urban planner in regions in conflict. Through course work, discussions with faculty and students, directed reading, and the culmination of the year - a meeting with planners from the Balkans - I took a long journey that brought me back to where I started: housing can be a tool to stabilize an area’s economy, promote racial or cultural integration, and maybe even promote peace.
