14
Mar
Celebrating the Life of Joan Dye Gussow, Champion of Local, Organic Food Systems
(Beyond Pesticides, March 14, 2025) Beyond Pesticides celebrates the life and legacy of Joan Dye Gussow, EdD, a leader in the organic and local food movements for decades. Dr. Gussow passed away at 96 years young on Friday, March 6, at her home in Rockland County, New York.
As the matriarch of the “eat locally, think globally†movement (New York Times), Dr. Gussow embodied what it means to practice what you preach with decades of experience in pesticide-free, regenerative organic gardening, where she grew seasonal produce for her own consumption.
In her book, The Feeding Web, Gussow explains why gardening matters:
“Food comes from the land. We have forgotten that. If we do not learn it again, we will die….Are we not, in fact, more helpless than any people before us, less able to fend for ourselves, more cut off from sources of nourishment? What would we do if we could not get to the supermarket?â€
Dr. Gussow represents the values of community- and people-first organic principles in food and land management systems. By 1971, the year after she published her first book on the relationship between nutrition and children’s performance in school, Dr. Gussow was invited to testify before Congress about Saturday morning cereal commercials and the confusing, harmful messages they send to children and families about food.
Dr. Gussow emphasized that organic, regenerative, sustainable food systems, and ecologically based land and pest management, mean very little if they do not support local communities, and she understood that as a leading thinker not just about food systems, but also about how unfettered consumerism is counterintuitive to planetary health.
Highlights from the 39th Pesticide Forum in NYC
Dr. Gussow delivered a keynote speech at Beyond Pesticides’ 39th National Pesticide Forum hosted at the New York Academy of Medicine on April 5-6, 2019. The following highlights some excerpts that not only stand the test of time but offer critical insight into how to achieve a more sustainable future.
“Way back in the 1950s, over 60 years ago, the purveyors of a post-World War II arsenal of novel pest-killing chemicals knew that resistance to those chemicals would occur so that farmers who became dependent on any single product would regularly need to shift to something new.
“They also knew, now that [Rachel] Carson had pointed it out, that the poisons of which we were trying to exterminate, everything we viewed as threatening to us or to our crops, were working their way up the food chain that we sat on top of, poisoning on their way lots of other things in the environment besides the particular pest being targeted. It’s important to keep in mind that at the time the book was published, almost 40 years ago, lots of non-chemical approaches to controlling crop pests had been familiar to professionals for decades, among them the development of insect-resistant strains of crops, insect pathogens, biological control, sterile males, hormonal control of insect growth, alteration of farming practices, organic production, for example, mechanical devices, the use of resistant crop plants, and so on.â€
“All of which is to say that our agriculture is more deeply trapped in a chemical web than we were before GMOs were invented as a solution. And it wasn’t as if no one knew. As Iowa State University’s 2012 Herbicide Guide for Iowa Corn and Soybean Production stated, ‘History has proven time and time again that herbicide-based weed management will inevitably fail.’â€
“The percentage of U.S. crop acreage planted to Roundup ready corn, cotton, and soy went from zero in 1996 to 90%. That’s the percent of acreage involved in genetically engineered crops. Herbicide use went through the ceiling. By that time, just as many observers had predicted, superweeds, untouchable by the herbicide, had invaded more than half of U.S. farms [2013]. It looked like it was time to try another approach.
Right? Wrong. Monsanto, slipping out from under its increasingly damned reputation, folded into Bayer, which introduced two new genetically stacked versions of soy. One resistant to both glyphosate and an older, more toxic pesticide called 2,4-D, and another resistant to a truly lethal old pesticide called dicamba.
Dicamba-resistant soy was widely planted, almost immediately, and because the pesticide is extremely volatile and moves off to places where it isn’t sprayed, we’ve already seen a picture of what happens to peach trees. Dicamba has already caused widespread damage in surrounding fields and backyards to fruits, vegetables, commercial and residential gardens and trees, including orchard trees. It has put some farmers out of business, and others have been forced to buy dicamba-resistant seed because they can’t afford to risk losing their soybean crop, and by planting the variety that they really want to, which is a wonderful marketing method.â€
Reflecting on Women’s Month
Dr. Gussow understood the dangers of relying on a product substitution model for pest management and the corrosive nature of pesticide manufacturers and moneyed interest in undermining the regulatory system meant to protect public health and the environment.
That begins said, March is Women’s History Month, and we find it an honor to celebrate the legacy and impact of Gussow as a leader who recognized the importance in moving beyond siloes to address the cascading crises of biodiversity collapse, public health fragility, and climate change before they were part of the broader discourse.
Beyond Pesticides recognizes the importance of amplifying and highlighting leadership for women and femme-identifying individuals at a time when women’s health is under threat by the continuous use of toxic petrochemical-based pesticides. See a recent Daily News, On International Women’s Day, Pesticide Risks to Women’s Health Call for Urgent Transition to Organic, to learn more on the disproportionate risks that women faced from a failed regulatory system that does not embody the precautionary principle.
See the latest Action of the Week to tell Congress to insist on eliminating pesticides that endanger women’s health.Â
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides. Â
Sources: New York Times
