Joan Gussow

Author
This Organic Life

Dr. Joan Dye Gussow is a serious food producer, a writer, and officially a retiree from Teachers College, Columbia University where she is Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita, former chair of the Nutrition Education Program. There she still co-teaches her popular course on nutritional ecology every fall.

She has served on and chaired the boards of many organizations, but currently serves only on the boards of Just Food, the Sustainability Fund, and the Frontera Farmer Foundation. Until December of 2012, she was also on the Board of Trustees of her Hudson River village. She has previously served two terms on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and single terms on the FDA's Food Advisory Committee, and the National Organic Standards Board.

She is author, coauthor or editor of a number of articles and several books; the latter include The Feeding Web, The Nutrition Debate, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture and This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, published in 2001 and based on the lessons learned from 30 years of working on growing her own. Gussow now lives writes, and grows all her own organic produce on the west bank of the Hudson River. Her latest book Growing, Older was published by Chelsea Green in November of 2010.