Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Movement Matriarch
by Brian Halweil   Mar 5 2010 by edible Manhattan,
http://www.ediblemanhattan.com/march-april-2010/movement-matriarch.htm

   Last spring, when hundreds of alums and faculty of the nutrition program 
of Columbia University Teachers College gathered to commemorate the 
department's 100th anniversary, one speaker riveted the audience. Shoulders 
back, patrician chin jutting forward, Joan Gussow strode toward the stage. A 
recent octogenarian, she remains in remarkable shape.

   "Good morning. I don't come with slides," the seasoned speaker quipped to 
immediate laughter. "But I have to say that if anyone told me 35 years ago 
that I would be speaking after a Manhattan borough president had talked about 
New York City's foodshed, I would have thought they were smoking dope." More 
laughter and applause. "So this is a thrilling moment for me."

    Thrilling because for the past 40 years-half her life-Gussow, a longtime 
occupant of the Mary Swartz Rose chair of the college's Nutrition Program, 
the oldest in the nation, has been waging a tireless war against the 
industrialization of the American food system. Long before mad cow, avian 
flu, E. coli or the "diabesity" epidemic made headlines, Gussow foretold the 
impacts of the post-modern diet on public health, ecology and culture, 
"depressing generations of graduate students," as she now puts it, with the 
news that "life as they knew it was not sustainable, and destined to come to 
an end unless we urgently changed our ways." And along the way she didn't 
just lay the foundation for modern-day locavores. She also challenged 
nutritionists everywhere to look up from their microscopes to see the 
cafeteria, the factory farm and beyond.

   "In many places we have begun serious dialogues about the corporate 
malnourishment of our children," she told the crowd last spring. "We have 
painfully begun to fix school lunch, and we have a family in the White House 
that is publicly committed to local, organic food and has begun digging up 
part of our national lawn for a vegetable garden. It is hard to not yield to 
a kind of heart-lifting optimism."

   But Gussow's hopefulness was really just a polite intro, and in typical 
firebrand form she soon dropped a bomb: To a room of nutritionists, many of 
whom have long seen her as their matriarch, she announced that she had 
stopped introducing herself as one. Months earlier, while preparing this 
much-anticipated talk, she had shared with me a solemn epiphany: "I have 
concluded that it is highly likely that the science of nutrition is no longer 
improving things. The public is being influenced. But we're not part of it. 
What people feel is not nutrients. It's eggplants and peaches."

   These days, denouncing the perils of our food supply seems common-and like 
common sense-but Gussow's been doing so for decades, and although most food 
activists today are echoing her ideas, a substantial number of her students 
and nearly all her peers once considered her certifiably insane for drawing a 
direct connection between the way we farm and the way we eat.

rest of article at
http://www.ediblemanhattan.com/march-april-2010/movement-matriarch.htm
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