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“Stuff the dried leaves gently between the burlap and the tree. Work them into the branches but be careful not to break any branches. There are more leaves over there near the river. You hold the burlap open while Mark stuffs the leaves in. Yes, that’s good. Don’t skimp on the leaves; it gets cold here in the winter and fig trees need plenty of insulation. Now wrap the burlap tight. Don’t leave any gaps.��

That’s more or less what I remember from that November day sometime in the late 1990s. Dr. Joan Dye Gussow was directing the three visitors she had invited for a “working lunch.�� We were tromping around the sodden backyard of her home perched on the Hudson River’s left bank, just upriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge. If you stood at the very back end of her lot—the rear edge of a long, narrow yard saturated with a helter-skelter horticultural extravaganza of which the fig tree was only the latest addition—you could kneel to the ground and thrust your hand into the fast-flowing waters.

We three “guests�� had suspected all along that this would be no free lunch. As we were all working hard to keep up with Joan’s instructions, I recall spontaneously breaking into some improvised lines “I ain’t gonna work on Joan’s farm no more��.�� But with the tree finally wrapped snugger than a new-born infant lashed to her mother’s chest, we proceeded to pick up our tools and scraps of materials expecting to now be fed. We should have known better. The work portion of the morning’s activities would be followed by a mini-ecological lecture that was as wide-ranging as Joan’s capacious mind. We learned more about the life of the Hudson, the risk to flooding her backyard (which would happen soon), the history of a newly developed, nearby community garden, and the infinite complexities of and reasons-why she chose the fruit and vegetable varieties she did.

Not content to stick with the abundant natural classroom that surrounded us for our lessons, she seized on another teaching moment. Upon spotting my untied shoelace, she said, “Here, let me show you a new way to tie your shoes. Do it this way (she bent over and made some complicated twists and turns with my laces), and they’ll never come loose again. Now you try.�� I kneeled, tried manipulating the laces in a similar fashion as Joan’s interceding digits corrected my mistakes. Never finding the same configuration as her, I finally said with exasperation that what I learned when I was four years old was good enough. “There’s always a better way!�� she cajoled me with a teasing grin.

As with the way we keep our shoes secured to our feet, so it was with our food system. As far as Joan Gussow was concerned, once she had turned her prodigious intellect to the issues of food production and consumption, she knew there had to be a better way. Her research, analysis, and warnings were compiled in her 1980s and 1990s books including the Feeding Web, The Nutrition Debate, and my all-time favorite, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture: Who Will Grow Tomorrow’s Food? It’s an oeuvre that both guided and inspired the food movement by making connections between health, nutrition, agriculture, sustainability, and the corporate food culture that was then sending it slimy tentacles in every direction. When I would hear her speak at the many food and farm conferences that were then gaining popularity, I couldn’t help but compare her to Paul Revere sounding the alarm—instead of Redcoats, however, it was the industrial food system that was coming and we had better be prepared to take up the appropriate arms. And if there was a notion that propelled Joan into the saddle of her mighty steed faster than any other, it was a headline like this one from a 1980 New York Times article: “Outwitting Nature to Produce More Food�� (as quoted in Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture).

As a woman of science in an era when science was still not comfortable with women, Joan brought the rigors of her training and education to the one niche where women dominated—nutritional science. But she wasn’t buying the better living through chemistry mantra that the industry was putting out, and that women like my mother were lapping up faster than an electric can opener could shear the top off a can of beans. She’d rail against the Disneyfication of our food supply best expressed by Epcot Center’s “technological paradise…where the plants are held up by mesh rather than messy dirt…and the air filtered and sterilized to prevent the introduction of insects and disease.�� This would lead to her “spread[ing] the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm�� that two USDA scientists, Marin Rogoff and Stephen Rawlins, had deployed a nightmarish biotechnology process that would bypass natural farming practices of raising chicken with a laboratory extrusion of sun, CO2, water, and cellulose. Dr. Gussow would label this technology and the descent from nature-based food production as “Chicken Little.�� She warned that, henceforth, our food supply would be Pharmed, not farmed.

The role that Joan the Scientist played in spotlighting the shift from real to ersatz food is perhaps less important than the role that Joan the Teacher played. As I was starting my career in the 1980s in Hartford, I would increasingly run into people who were or had been her students, those that had read her books, or referred to a talk of hers they had just heard. They always impressed me as among the most passionate and committed of the colleagues I would work with, people with the most fire in the belly. The number of Joan’s acolytes grew over the decades, and like a million butterflies, set off on a mission of pollination across the land. Providing nourishing instruction was Joan’s great gift, and she bestowed it generously and lovingly, whether you were a student of hers at Columbia Teacher’s College or a plodding practitioner like myself patching together food projects in a crumbling city like Hartford.

We did eventually have lunch that November day. Joan’s creation was as lively and tasty as the conversation that ensued. Subsequent photographs of her garden that I’ve seen strongly suggest that the fig tree is flourishing, no doubt the result of the less than willing workers that folded one dead leaf after another into its proper cavity.

During the course of a sporadic email correspondence with Joan over the last few years, I never noticed a flagging in her interests, insights, and intense desire to be helpful. As she was marching toward her mid-nineties, I had asked her for an article “Women, Food and the Future�� that she had written in 1985 for some research I was doing on food and gender roles. Not being available online, it took her some considerable effort to find, copy, and mail it to me. In the article—a kind of manifesto that could have been titled “Feminism My Way!”—Joan strives at some length to affirm the traditional nurturing role of women, not to deny them access to the same opportunities as men but to assert that the threats to the planet, including the food supply, require the kind of eco-feminist attention that women are well suited to provide. “Women are told that in order to ‘make it�� they have to be more like men,�� Joan wrote. She went on to say that, “I find the idea that women should try to join the male world terrifying��.[T]he earth is not in crisis for lack of technologists but for lack of nurturing. I know that the food system and the society are in trouble…[But] I do not believe that things will be remedied by women learning to fit into the existing system, but by working with men to change the system to a more sustainable one.��

If the 1960s idea of Earth Mother is still relevant today—and not only do I believe it is, but we may also in fact need it more than ever—Joan Dye Gussow sits astride that throne like the true nurturing matriarch she is.