Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture: Who Will Produce Tomorrow's Food? (Toes Book) [Paperback]

Joan Dye Gussow (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Most of us are so far removed from the process of growing or producing food, we don't even think about it. The question of who will produce tomorrow's food has been stealthily parked in the next lot over from who is producing today's food. Both look suspiciously like the private spaces of some mega-corporation's executives. The fact that our food system is becoming increasingly controlled by giant industry may not surprise you; you probably just haven't thought about it. This is an excellent text for understanding how the current food production system really operates and where it is heading. We have a system of agriculture based on diminishing returns. In other words, it takes more energy to produce our food than our food produces-almost 10 times more. If you think the endlessly increasing use of technology will solve our world's hunger problems, Joan Dye Gussow will open your eyes. She offers not only a chilling prospect for the future, but also the possibility that forewarned is forearmed. -- From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by Ilene Rosoff

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Once again it is not neccessary to speculate about possible "surprises". The "attractive" and very new field of biotechnology has already seen an intentional non-release of possibly damaging information on the part of interested scientists. In 1989, a mysterious outbreak of illness that ultimately killed 27 people and afflicted 1,535 others was rapidly traced to the use of an amino acid, L-tryptophan as a dietary supplement. It was traced somewhat more slowly to specific batches of that supplement made by a Japanese company over a particular time period. What was not publicly revealed until almost nine months later was the deadly tryptophan was produced by gene splicing.

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Bootstrap Pr (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942850327
• ISBN-13: 978-0942850321
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #186,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Dye Gussow, EdD, is Mary Swartz Rose Professor emerita and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been a long-time analyst and critic of the U.S. food system. In her classic 1978 book The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, which tracked the environmental hazards of an increasingly globalizing food system, she foreshadowed by several decades the current interest in relocalizing the food supply.

Her subsequent books include The Nutrition Debate (1986), Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture (1991), and This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader (2001), the latter based on the lessons learned from decades of working toward growing her own, Her 2010 book, Growing, Older, is as it's subtitle suggests, a garden-based collection of "reflections on death, life and vegetables".

Born in 1928 in Alhambra, California, Gussow grew up in a California landscape dominated by clear skies, orange groves and lines of eucalyptus trees. She graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, California in 1950, with a BA (pre-medical) and moved east to New York City. After seven years as a researcher at Time Magazine and five years as a suburban wife and mother, she returned to school to earn an M.Ed and an Ed.D. in Nutrition Education from Columbia's Teachers College.

Early in her career she managed to scandalize significant portions of her chosen profession by testifying to a Congressional Committee about the poor quality of the foods advertised to children on television; her willingness to tackle difficult topics did not abate during her 40 some years in the field.

During her career she has served in a number of capacities for various public, private, and governmental organizations, including chairing the Boards of the National Gardening Association, the Society for Nutrition Education, the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation, and Just Food, serving two terms on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences, a term on the FDA's Food Advisory Committee and a term on the National Organic Standards Board.

In addition to her books, she has also produced a variety of articles on food-related topics. Gussow currently lives, writes, and grows organic vegetables on the west bank of the Hudson River. She is at work on a new book based on the complete destruction and miraculous resurrection of her beloved garden. Her tentative title: "Starting Over at 81".