Currently browsing posts about: Obituaries

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

*For some reason, my original post did not get sent out so I am trying again

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

[*For some reason, this did not get sent out this morning so I am reposting it.]

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

This is a big personal loss.  I met Narsai David—chef, host, raconteur, radio personality, philanthropist, theater lover, friend—in 1955 when we lived at the student co-ops at Berkeley.  These required 5 hours of work a week, and I did mine peeling potatoes under Narsai’s supervision at the co-op central kitchen.

We stayed in touch over the years, sometimes memorably, as when we were both filmed with Craig Claiborne and Frank Blair for the KQED show, Over Easy in 1980 or so (that’s me on the right).

And then there was the 1997 Oldways trip to Crete where Narsai whipped off breads for the hundred or so guests lucky enough to be at that dinner.

He was the most extraordinarily generous person, quietly contributing to food, co-op, theater, and I’m sure other groups throughout the Bay Area.  He was on my list for people to see every time I was out there, sometime appearing on his radio show, and sometimes invited to his and Veni’s home for warm and gracious evenings.

We were friends for more than 60 years, it shocks me to realize.  I’m so saddened by his loss.

This is Memorial Day, and it seems appropriate to use this time and space to mourn the death of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock last week.  He was only 53.

I had brief appearances as a talking head in Super Size Me! (2004) and also Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017)—although so briefly that I did not get mentioned in the credits.

Super Size Me! was the first time I was interviewed for a major documentary and I wish I could remember more about its filming, which took place a year or so before the film’s release.  By the time it came out, I had forgotten about it, but was invited to the premier—a thrilling experience.

The film was fun—enormously entertaining as well as educational.  Morgan was a great storyteller, and one with a mission to improve the American diet.  The first film focused on overeating fast food.  The second focused more on food system issues; it too is well worth seeing.

In 2019, I wrote a blog post about the second film which, when released, was accompanied by a pop-up restaurant: “From my food politics point of view, the film is a must-see.  It is a compelling, beautifully photographed, disturbing, cynical, utterly devastating account of industrial chicken production.”

Spurlock was a great filmmaker, and I view the end of his life as a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.   He took a highly ethical position and wrote a confession about his poor behavior toward women.  This destroyed his career and the film disappeared.

I hoped he would recover from that and did not know of his illness.  His loss saddens me enormously. I hope his memory will be a blessing.

Addition, May 28: I’m quoted in an assessment of Spurlock’s work in the Times of London. 

Bettina Siegel writes with sad news: Dana Woldow died last week.

I will miss her.  Dana was my go-to person for information about school meal funding, a fierce advocate for getting more funding for school food service.  If you wanted to understand school food politics, her columns at Beyond Chron were essential reading.  The last one was posted September 19, 2016 with good and bad news about San Francisco’s school meals.

I often referred to her columns in this blog.  Here are some examples dating back to 2008:

• Feb 20, 2008: Thanks to Dana Woldow of the San Francisco Unified School District for sending this link to resources for making school meals healthier. Check out the salad bar video (way down at the bottom of the list of links). The city now has salad bars in 25 schools.
• Aug 25, 2008: And here’s a commentary in the San Francsico Chronicle from some folks on the front line of school lunches in the San Francisco Bay area.  Even a little more money would go a long way.
• Sept 5, 2009: Dana Woldow’s terrific 3-minute video detailing the situation in San Francisco’s public schools – as seen by kids in that system.  As the kids put it, “We need better school food!”
• May 24, 2013: Fortunately, Dana Woldow, also a long time food advocate, has just posted an interview with Ms. Siegel on just those points.
• Nov 5, 2014: Dana Woldow, who has covered these elections closely on the website Beyond Chron, has this to say about the Berkeley win.
• Feb 17, 2015: As to what all this [the fight over school food] is about, see Dana Woldow’s explanation in Beyond Chron.  As she bluntly puts the matter, “It would be comforting to think that SNA members are making those decisions based on what is most nutritious and healthy for growing kids, but unfortunately they are just as likely to be influenced by the recommendations of Big Food companies peddling processed crap.”
• March 9, 2015: Dana Woldow argues that the school food scene would be much easier if schools actually got enough money to pay for what they serve and for decent wages to school food service workers.
• July 21, 2015: Dana Woldow explains what’s really happening with schools that drop out of the meal programs ostensibly on the grounds that the new standards cost too much.

Dana: I will miss your tough, on-the-ground analysis of school food politics.  You always called it as you saw it.  And you saw plenty.

May others take up your cause.  Now.

The International Culinary Center announced yesterday that its president and founder, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, died in a car accident.  I’ve heard that the accident was in Nova Scotia, but cannot find details.

Dorothy was a star in New York’s food world.   Her Wikipedia entry tells some of the story.

But I knew her best as someone who dreamed big and made the dreams come true.

I met her in the early days of the French Culinary Institute when we met to work out a partnership—her idea—with NYU’s newly launched food studies programs.

That worked.  So did much else.

She turned ICC into a go-to place for programs as well as culinary arts.  I was privileged to participate in those programs occasionally.

I was even more privileged to be part of her occasional Ladies Who Lunch group at L’Ecole.

I watched her handle ambassadors and dignitaries at Food Expo in Milan.  Back in New York, I saw her receive high honors from the French government.

I have no doubt the press will have much to say about all she accomplished.

To me she will always be the girl from Queens who longed for Manhattan, got there, and made many wonderful things happen.

I cannot believe she is gone.  I will miss her.

Obituaries, September 20

• Washington Post
• Grub Street
• New York Times

The Times’ obituary for Dr. Albert J. (“Mickey”) Stunkard, who died last week at the age of 92, describes his work on the genetics of obesity and quotes Dr. Walter Willett’s comment that genetics accounts for only a small part of the “legions of the obese.”

Stunkard was writing about the lifestyle and environmental determinants of weight gain, long before most of us had a clue.

I learned this in 2000 when Michael Jacobson and I were writing a paper on public health policy approaches to obesity prevention.[i]   We were arguing that policies aimed at preventing weight gain focused almost entirely on personal behavior but needed to focus on fixing the environment of food choice.

A peer reviewer scolded us for missing Stunkard’s work.

At last, we discovered Stunkard’s groundbreaking work.  In the published paper, we wrote:

The most notable exception [to the focus on personal responsibility] was the report of a 1977 conference organized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to review research and develop recommendations for obesity prevention and management.

In one paper, A.J. Stunkard thoroughly reviewed social and environmental influences on obesity.[ii]  As a result, the conference report included an extraordinarily broad list of proposals for federal, community, and private actions to foster dietary improvements and more active lifestyles.

These ranged from coordinated health education and model school programs to changes in regulations for grades of meat, advertising, taxes, and insurance premiums. Some of the proposals cut right to the core of the matter: “Propose that any national health insurance program…recognize obesity as a disease and include within its benefits coverage for the treatment of it.” “Make nutrition counseling reimbursable under Medicare.” And “Fund demonstration projects at the worksite.”[iii]

He was far ahead of his time and will be greatly missed.

References

[i] Nestle M, Jacobson MF.  Halting the obesity epidemic: A public health policy approach.  Public Health Reports 2000;115:12-24.

[ii] Stunkard AJ. Obesity and the social environment: current status, future

prospects. In: Bray GA, editor. Obesity in America. Washington:

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (US); 1979. NIH Pub.

No.: 79-359.

[iii] Stunkard A. The social environment and the control of obesity. In:

Stunkard AJ, editor. Obesity. Philadelphia: WB Saunders; 1980. p. 438-