Episode #280
Pam Koch: Joan Gussow’s Nutritional Ecology Legacy

Pam Koch carries forward Joan Gussow’s work by teaching students to see food as part of a larger living system, not just a collection of nutrients. Pam has taken over Joan Gussow’s renowned Nutritional Ecology course at Columbia Teachers College. This survey style class offers a way to think about nutritionism, reductionist science, real organic food, and the deeper sentiment Joan always shared: nutrition isn’t just about what food does inside the body, but what our food choices do to soil, water, ecosystems, and the future of human health.

Pam Koch’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Pam Koch was interviewed by Dave Chapman in the Spring of 2025

Pam Koch
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m happy to be talking with Pam Koch today. Pam, hello. Pam is the third Mary Swartz Rose Professor of Nutrition?

Pam Koch
Yeah, Mary Swartz Rose of Nutrition and Education.

Dave Chapman
Nutrition and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. I’m close. I know. My only connection with all this in the past was through our mutual friend Joan Gussow. I met you through that and preparing for a memorial for her. You have picked up Joan’s mantle at Columbia, teaching this amazing course or courses that she developed.

Dave Chapman
I loved the story of the first time that she started Nutritional Ecology, which I think was her truly famous course. Her husband said to her, “Joan, you don’t know enough to teach that.” She said, “I know. I don’t, but nobody else does either, so I have to do it.” So, could you talk about how you came to know Joan? Were you her student first? Was that it?

Pam Koch
I was her student first. Maybe before I talk about that, one of the other things that she always said, in addition to her husband saying, “You don’t know enough to teach it,” and her saying, “Well, if I don’t, who will?” is that she said she was trying to figure out how to put all of these pieces of the food system together because no one had taught it.

Pam Koch
She started out by clipping articles that she thought in one way or another related to the food system, and filing them and trying to figure out what seemed to go together and what made sense. She always talked about that. It wasn’t until we were cleaning out her house that I actually found one of those marble composition boxes, that are little file boxes, that she had. They were full of articles from the 1970s that I think were her original attempts at trying to put together the pieces of this course.

Pam Koch
I majored in nutrition and dietetics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and then did my master’s there. Then I was in Missouri for a couple of years. It was while I was in Missouri for those couple of years that someone in nutrition handed me a book that was related to how our food choices affect the environment in some way. That wasn’t something that I had been taught, and it wasn’t something that I’d really thought about. I said, “That seems logical – that seems like it should be a connection.”

Pam Koch
Then I went to the Society for Nutrition Education Conference in 1991, which was before I came to Teachers College. Joan was very active in that organization at that time. She had been president in 1980. There were two sessions going on at the same time. One was called something like “Filling Up Your Nutrition Education Toolbox,” and the other one was on fish – “Will We Have Fish in the Future?”

Pam Koch
When I walked by the room for the toolbox one, there was a line waiting to get into the room. It was so overpacked. I decided – and I was quite young at the time – to go to the one about, “Will we have fish in the future?” I walked into the room, and there were probably eight or ten of us in the room, which was very small. Joan was one of them. I think the first thing that she ever said to me was, “I’m so glad a young person is interested in whether or not we’ll have fish in the future.”

Pam Koch
That was my introduction to Joan. Then I applied to Teachers College for a doctoral program. Honestly, I was not even sure if I had put together that that’s where Joan was, from that comment from the conference, and then I figured it out pretty quickly and took her Nutritional Ecology course as a student in 1993. At that time, we had a really active program called Earth Friends exploring the whole story of food that Joan and others had started in the late 1970s to basically teach school kids about the food system.

Pam Koch
So, I immediately got really involved in that program, I got involved in a lot of other school-related programs that were having school children, mostly in New York City, but other places as well, have experiences with gardening, cooking, and learning about the food system and food justice.

Pam Koch
Then it wasn’t until 2012 that I started teaching the course with Joan. At that time, I wasn’t yet in the Mary Swartz Rose position, which would be the position that would continue teaching it, but the hopes were that eventually I would be able to continue teaching the course and have as many years left as Joan was able and willing to teach, to be able to teach with her, to take it all in, and be able to – as you said before – take on that mantle and continue the course in our program.

Dave Chapman
I want to talk more about Joan as a teacher, and how long she did that, which is amazing. But can you tell people about what that does Nutritional Ecology mean? When I talked to Joan about it, I thought, “Oh, my God. Are you recording all this? Because I want to take this course, and that means a lot of people want to take it.” What does that mean?

Pam Koch
It is really the connection of how what we eat affects the environment around us. That’s, I think, the broadest definition. The course takes a really broad approach. If we had to say what kind of course it is, it’s more of a survey course, which means we are looking at a lot of topics, and therefore we can’t look at any one topic in great depth.

Pam Koch
Joan started teaching the course in the early 1970s. There’s a book that came out that you’ve probably heard of, called “The Limits to Growth,” that was by Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, and others. That came out right around the same time that Joan was starting to teach this course.

Pam Koch
What that book really said was we are really going to reach the limits of our planet’s capacity – this was in 1972 – within the next 50 to 100 years. Now it’s 50 years later, and very interestingly, to fast forward for a second, we have been following what they predicted would happen. They predicted that by 2020, so 50 years after they wrote the book, we would be starting to see the limits to the system, which is what we are seeing.

Pam Koch
The course still starts with a session that is, “Are we reaching the limits to our planet’s capacity?” Then it goes on to think about whether or not we have a problem with producing enough food or overpopulation, to understanding how we use energy to produce our food, to many sessions that are on agriculture that touch on basically what is the history of agriculture in the United States, but also around the world.

Pam Koch
Of course, there’s a session on organic, biotechnology, on the true costs of food, and then we end with sessions that take it very local, a session on local, and then one that takes it more global on trade and development, and how that relates to food.

Pam Koch
It really has been described by our students for generations as transformative, because they are thinking about topics and issues that they have never thought about before, and so it opens up a new world to the students who take it.

Dave Chapman
For me, I think that is the purpose of the Real Organic Podcast. It is to address all those issues from many perspectives. So, of course, as Michael Pollan said, “Every time I think I have a good idea, I discover Joan had it first, and has been doing it for five or ten years.”

Dave Chapman
One thing that’s interesting to me about this is just to say Joan, at that point, was self-identified as a nutritionist. So far, I haven’t heard you mention nutrition in that course, is that true? Or did you just fail to mention it? Is it really not so much about the impact of the food system on our body, but more the impact of what we eat on the whole system?

Pam Koch
First of all, I think those two things are really connected. How we produce our food is going to very much impact how it affects the inside of our body. I know it’s been really hard to have research that actually shows that impact, but I just think that logically, it makes sense that those are connected.

Pam Koch
However, because we are a program in nutrition, and our program is training people to be dietitians, there are many, many other courses where they are getting all of that, what we call – and what was Joan’s term -“after the swallow,” what happens to food once it gets in the body. This course is much less focused on that.

Pam Koch
Do we touch upon it, and do we make connections to their other courses where they’re learning that? Absolutely, and we’re doing that throughout, and this course is really meant to be the broader food system course, since they’re having all of those other courses.

Dave Chapman
That’s great, it’s been so missing. I think people talk about hunger. They have a hunger for this understanding. It’s wonderful that it’s gone on for, how many years now?

Pam Koch
I think Joan started teaching it in 1970 or …

Dave Chapman
Okay. So, over 50 years. Joan, somewhere towards the end of her career, said that she no longer identified herself as a nutritionist. I assume you heard that.

Pam Koch
Yes.

Dave Chapman
What do you think that she meant by that? Why did she say that?

Pam Koch
It’s a good question. I think she really identified as a nutritionist for much of her career. Let me back up. This might sound like it’s not answering your question, but what is really interesting is, what is the science of nutrition? Nutrition as a discipline didn’t exist until the 1900s, which makes it a relatively new science.

Pam Koch
Before the first vitamin was discovered, which was just over 100 years ago in the 1910s, there wasn’t any understanding of anything being essential for us. There was some understanding of how we get energy from food, and an understanding of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, which are the macronutrients and their role.

Pam Koch
Joan came into the field and started studying nutrition in the late 1960s. If you think about it, if the first vitamins were discovered in the 1910s, it was still really new. I think she, at first, got excited about, “Well, what is essential? Do we know everything that’s essential? Are there any other minerals that are essential? Then how do vitamins interact with each other?”

Pam Koch
But once that was all discovered, which it was, it kind of went in a different direction. We now know so much more about human nutrition than we did a century ago, yet we have let our food supply be completely divergent from that. That is because our food supply follows our capitalistic system, which I think you’ve talked a lot about with people on the Real Organic Podcast.

Pam Koch
It’s really ironic. If we had said, “Okay, we want our food supply to have the foods that we now know from nutrition science nourish us,” we would have a different food supply. I think why Joan thought that she didn’t see that anymore is because she started to see we don’t need any more reductionistic nutrition research.

Pam Koch
What we need is to understand how people think about food and what makes it possible for people to change their eating behaviors, almost despite the challenging food supply. That’s the area that I do research in, and it gets a lot less research attention and dollars. So, I think that’s why she didn’t see herself as a nutritionist anymore, because that’s where the field was going, primarily.

Dave Chapman
I know that Joan was one of the inspirations for Michael Pollan’s book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” which talks about this a lot. It’s an excellent book. I just listened to it again. I wasn’t able to read it, so I listened to it while I was working in the greenhouse.

Dave Chapman
It talks a lot about nutritionism as a non-science, and it’s something that misleads us. Michael said, “I’m guilty of it. Even though I’ve written this book, I still am suckered in by nutritionism.” Could you talk a little bit about what nutritionism means?

Pam Koch
It really means that we are focused on how nutrients interact in our body, and we are looking at it to understand them in a reductionistic, defined way for each nutrient. I think that nutritionism is very much a result of how exciting it was when all of these vitamins were first discovered.

Pam Koch
Let’s take us back 100 years. This is, by the way, when Mary Schwartz Rose founded our program, which was founded in 1909. All of these vitamins were being discovered, and these diseases like scurvy, the deficiency disease for vitamin C, which most people have heard of.

Pam Koch
There were many diseases like rickets, which is vitamin D, and pellagra and beriberi, which are B vitamins that people really had no idea what caused people to get them, and then why some people got it even in the same household but other people didn’t, and why some people got better but other people didn’t. Germ theory was also new at the time, so there were a lot of questions about what caused people to get sick.

Pam Koch
Imagine discovering it was this hidden substance in food that made people get that illness. If they ingested that hidden substance in food, they would get better. That was absolutely amazing. Mary Schwartz Rose, in a lot of her writing – she was a very prolific and beautiful writer – was literally saying, “I have to go tell the school children, because their parents can’t even know this information because it wasn’t discovered yet when they were in school. So, I have to go tell the school children to tell their families.”

Pam Koch
She had this book list that she wrote in 1923, so 102 years ago now, that was called “Food Lessons for Nutrition Classes.” I love that title because there were no vitamin supplements at the time; vitamins were just newly discovered. There was no way to isolate them and put them in a pill. What she was saying is, “I’m telling the kids the foods they need to eat to match this new science of nutrition.”

Pam Koch
We got completely caught up in that as a society, and we still believe there’s going to be these magic bullets found in the field of nutrition. In my opinion, and I know Joan had this opinion too, because we talked so much about this is, I think all those big discoveries have happened, and what we need now is the more human side of why people eat what they eat, and how people make choices in this very challenging food supply to be able to change things.

Pam Koch
Then, of course, also to advocate for changing the food supply at the same time. But that’s why I think Michael Pollan, you, me, and everyone still gets caught up in that, because that history is still pretty recent, and when it was happening it was pretty powerful, because it was really big changes.

Dave Chapman
People ask me all the time – we talk about things like soil-grown blueberries and how much better they are, and how much better they are for you compared to a hydroponic berry from Peru that’s certified as organic, and everything about it is wrong. You can just check down the list: climate, community, nutrition, all of it, I think it’s wrong.

Dave Chapman
They said, “Well, do a test on the nutrition,” which actually we are doing right now. But what I’ve come to believe is it’s not so easy. It’s not to say that there isn’t a nutritional difference that’s real, but it’s not so easy to test it. I think this gets to what you’re talking about – reductionist science versus systemic or holistic approaches.

Dave Chapman
So, could you talk about that? People talk about reductionist science, and most people go, “I actually don’t know what you’re talking about.” What does that mean?

Pam Koch
To define reductionist science in the most simple terms, it is to do a very controlled experiment so that what we would be trying to do, and let’s just take vitamin C as the substance, is isolate just how much vitamin C someone is getting, and have ideally a randomized group of people that are getting this level of vitamin C and a randomized group of people that are getting this level of vitamin C and be testing X outcome, and see if there’s a difference so that you’re controlling everything else except for that amount of vitamin C.

Pam Koch
First of all, in human experiments, that’s impossible. Maybe you can do that in a controlled lab environment, but it’s really impossible to do with humans living in the world. It’s just impossible to do because there are so many other variables. But that makes it not reductionist science, because you’re not controlling all of the variables.

Pam Koch
Why I think it’s so challenging to do the research, like you were just saying, on the two different blueberries, is there are thousands and thousands of substances, chemicals, or whatever we want to call them, phytonutrients, in foods that we barely have an understanding of.

Pam Koch
Most likely, none of those are things that we would die without, because we probably would have discovered that by now from the reductionist science that was done, but how they are helping us to maintain our microbiome and our long-term health, and the health of our blood, the health of our cells, and the health of everything, I personally can’t imagine that we could ever understand, because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

Pam Koch
So, trying to figure out how the hydroponic blueberry from Peru, what is in that, all of those chemicals versus all of those chemicals that are in a blueberry grown in soil that a farmer has stewarded and nourished over years and years and years, I can’t figure out how we would even be able to do that.

Pam Koch
But does my common sense as somebody who has studied nutrition for a really long time believe that there’s a difference in terms of what is going to maintain people’s long-term health as well as the health of the soil and society, absolutely do I think there’s a difference. Do I think that we can design an experiment that would show that? I think that’s a lot harder.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, that’s such an important distinction. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a truth there; it just means that we don’t know how to prove it. We don’t know how to prove that one thing is true and another thing is not true. That’s the limitation of science.

Dave Chapman
Science has been fantastic. We have learned a great deal by reductionist science, but it doesn’t mean we can learn everything from it, and not even everything that’s important. Just because you can prove something, it might be fairly insignificant in your life, but there might be something hugely important that you cannot prove. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, though.

Dave Chapman
So, Joan has always seemed to me to have a willingness to boldly state what she thought the truth was, as well as a willingness to say, “We don’t know how to prove this yet.” Would you agree with that?

Pam Koch
I agree. I think she became more that way as she got older. As we were preparing for her memorials, my son and I watched a lot of old videos of her to put together a compilation. I realized, especially with the videos when she was younger than she was when I came to the program at Teachers College in 1992, that I don’t know if she was as certain then as she was later, but I think as she got older, she got bolder.

Pam Koch
The other really important thing about Joan is she was always saying, “Is that the right question?” For example, to go back to those blueberries, is the right question how much of different vitamins those blueberries have? Maybe not, but that’s the question that often gets asked when foods are compared, because that’s what we can measure.

Pam Koch
To add on to what you said, sometimes we can’t know this, and sometimes we value the things that we can measure only because we can measure them, and therefore inadvertently discount the things that we can’t measure because we don’t have a measure for those things.

Dave Chapman
Pam, what do you think Joan might have thought the right question was?

Pam Koch
It’s a good question. She and I talked so much about this, because she talked so much about the time that she had to go to farmers in California, and she had done a lot of research that showed that there was no data from reductionist science that could show that organic foods were healthier than non-organic foods. I think she would say, “The right question is, what is it doing for the health of the planet and the health of the soil, and then believe that that is going to transfer onto human health.”

Dave Chapman
Okay. I absolutely do believe that it directly impacts human health, but if it’s unprovable, then it’s great. We can express an opinion. But it’s hard to have the science to show it in terms of those tests. The early classic organic books were all about human health. They were also about animal health, soil health, and plant health, but they were always about human health, and they were not shy about that. They were pretty convinced.

Dave Chapman
But we’ve gotten so good at proving things since then, but not necessarily what we need to know. So, would you say that the Nutritional Ecology course, as it evolved, became less about saying directly, “Let’s look at human health and the impact of diet on the person, but let’s look at the impact of a person’s diet on the planet and all the factors that come in to influence that.”

Pam Koch
I think it always had that element to it. I think what it was is that Joan went back to school in her late 40s. After she had children, after she was a mom raising her children, she became interested in nutrition because of feeding her children and wanting to do that right.

Pam Koch
Learning enough about it, and being who she was, bold about what she said, I think having her friends ask her what they should feed their children, she therefore thought, “Oh, I should go to school for this.” But then she felt like the people who were teaching the courses weren’t asking the right questions.

Pam Koch
She also always talked about how she had gone through a 10 to 15 year period from college to moving to New York City, living in a very small apartment, and working, to basically hardly being in grocery stores. Then moving to the suburbs in New York and buying her first home in Congers, and going into a supermarket, she was astonished at how much it had changed.

Pam Koch
It was almost like for that piece of culture she was absent for a while, and then recognized the change, and also recognized the increase in advertising of food. So, some of her very first work was on decreasing advertising to children. So, I think she and the course always had this very broad perspective of how what we eat impacts the environment and therefore then impacts human health. But it is always evolving.

Pam Koch
Like now, it’s a spring course, so I will be spending a lot of time in the fall and then in January before it starts going through all of the reading packets and keeping a few old favorites that have been in there since the very beginning, like some things related to “The Limits to Growth,” but then updating everything.

Pam Koch
Of course, we are in a time right now where what is going on in food policy and our understanding of food is complex, and a lot is in conflict with each other. For example, the US government saying they want all pesticides out of food, but giving pesticide companies decreased liability in what they do. So, it’s just so many contradictions that I will be figuring out how to put it together based on the current state of the world.

Dave Chapman
Yeah. We’ll come back to that. Maybe at the end, I’d like to hear your thoughts. Dan Barber felt that Joan’s impact was much greater than we realize, and that she would be much better known 20 years from now than she is today. Do you think that’s true?

Pam Koch
I think the world is catching up to Joan. I do think so. On the other hand, and I feel like this is on me as well as my colleagues, I think to make sure that happens, we need to keep her spirit and her influence alive. We have been collecting all of her writings and everything that she did, which was a lot over the decades.

Pam Koch
We do have someone at the Teachers College Library, the archivist, who will be putting it all together to make it an online platform where we can see all of Joan’s work. I think the world is moving quickly, and there is so much change. I’ll sometimes come across something that Joan wrote in 1983. I’ll pick it up and read it and say, “This is over 40 years old, but it is showing us what we need to do today.”

Pam Koch
I think we need to make sure that we keep her writing and her influence alive and well so that we can learn from her, because I do believe she was ahead of her time, and the world is catching up with her. I think she was happy that she lived long enough to see at least people talking about all of this more and recognizing the need to change more.

Pam Koch
I still think we have a long way to go to change and have a food supply that is nourishing everyone. But I think she was happy that she lived long enough to see the world starting to catch up to her.

Dave Chapman
In Joan’s early days of teaching at Teachers College and writing, was she basically alone in the wilderness? I remember the story of the first scientist who worked at Rodale. He had been at the University of Maryland before that, and he went back. It was very rare in those days for somebody from academia to come and speak at an organic conference and care about these things.

Dave Chapman
When he went back to the University of Maryland, he said his former colleagues would literally hug the wall on the other side of the hall when they walked by him. He was considered almost untouchable because they thought organic was unscientific at that point. That’s changed a lot. Do you think that was some of her experience in the early days?

Pam Koch
I think it was from the profession overall. Since Teachers College, as part of Columbia University, is a private institution known to be a very progressive place, known for people to have bold ideas, I think people accepted her for who she was within the walls of Teachers College, Columbia University, and saw her as someone who had bold ideas that made sense.

Pam Koch
I think she got a lot of support from the administration because of her bold ideas and what she was doing. I know she told me that she felt very lucky that she could always say what she wanted, and it didn’t affect her career or what people thought of her at Teachers College. Now, within the greater nutrition profession, I think there was a lot of pushback.

Pam Koch
I mentioned before that I first met Joan at a Society for Nutrition Education meeting, and by the way, now it’s Nutrition Education and Behavior. In that organization, there was a lot of challenge and conflict about whether we should be talking about this. “How should we as nutritionists be connected to the food industry or not connected to the food industry in order to maintain our independence and be able to say what we want?” That conflict in nutrition professional organizations is still going on today, and I know Joan experienced that.

Pam Koch
Just to give a very concrete example, and I would be happy to share this paper if you want to post it with the podcast: she was president of the Society for Nutrition Education in 1980, and her presidential speech was all about how there was division within the society based on how close or not we should be to the food industry, and the conflicts and challenges that came with that.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, very complicated issues, actually. Nutrition is complicated, and most people are far from being experts, but even the experts are often wrong, and 20 years later we realize, “Oh, that was completely wrong. We got it backwards. Fat is not evil.” So, I think that as people learn more and more, in a sense, they know less and less, and they come to know that they don’t know. We do look to nutritionists to see what their ideas are.

Dave Chapman
Joan was so bold. She once said to me, “We have never seen a study that revealed taking a supplement was beneficial for your health.” Did I get that right? Would you agree with that statement?

Pam Koch
I’m not sure that there’s ever been a study. However, there have been a lot of studies that thought that supplements would be helpful and then found them not to be. I’ll give you an example, which is beta carotene. There was thought that beta carotene would be helpful for, I think, preventing heart disease.

Pam Koch
I even remember, by the way, the pharmaceutical company, Roche, R – O – C – H – E, that makes supplements had ads that were like, “Beta carotene! Good for cardiovascular disease and you need to eat this.” It was this wide cornucopia of beautifully colored fruits and vegetables, because that’s the only way you can get it.

Pam Koch
Then they literally took almost the same ad, and then, once they had it in a supplement form, said, “You used to have to eat this; now all you have to do is take this,” and showed a pill. But then when the research was done, it actually showed that it didn’t do anything in a pill.

Pam Koch
I think that that’s because of those thousands of phytonutrients attached to all those fruits and vegetables. It’s not just one thing. Just like taking one beneficial microorganism doesn’t make your microbiome healthier, it actually may even make it more imbalanced. Now I forgot what your question was.

Pam Koch
I agree with you that nutrition has changed. However, the basic premise of eating more whole, plant-based – which happens to be the term that is really popular now – foods and less processed foods and some animal foods, but not a lot of animal foods, has actually been the tried and true nutrition advice for decades, but it’s not sexy.

Pam Koch
But every epidemiological study that I know of shows how people are eating. The people who are eating more whole, plant-based foods, less processed foods, and moderate amounts of animal-based foods are the ones that tend to have the best health outcomes. So, we can simplify it and make it easier, but it’s not sexy.

Pam Koch
Again, I think it goes back to that reductionistic science and the magic of discovering vitamins that makes us think, “Oh, we’re going to discover this exact formula that makes us healthier.” I don’t think there is one. I think there are many ways to eat a healthy diet, and it’s eating mostly the local, plant-based foods that grow around you.

Dave Chapman
Let me ask about organic because, of course, Joan was a great champion of organic agriculture. She served five years on the National Organic Standards Board, which is a very thankless task, I will add, and mostly it’s listening to lobbyists from industry about why an exception should be made for their product. She really believed in organics.

Dave Chapman
I believe a plant-based, local diet is superior to eating a lot of ultra-processed food, which is how 60% of our calories, I think, are consumed in America’s ultra-processed food, which is not good for us. But I think Joan would take that final step, and I’ve been urging Michael Pollan to take it too, which is to say it should be “Mostly real organic.”

Dave Chapman
I think that there are many reasons beyond just nutrition, but I think there are nutrition reasons too. Would you say that I’m reflecting Joan’s beliefs pretty well in that statement?

Pam Koch
I think you are, because I think she would say, “We are connected to the ecosystem around us, and our ecosystem is in trouble.” Our water, air, and atmosphere are in trouble. That doesn’t only relate to how we’re producing food, but it can be helped by how we produce our food, and also it is affecting our food production, because we’re producing food in that world.

Pam Koch
But I think she would say, “If we want both people and the planet to be healthy, the best path to do that is for everyone to be eating real organic food, and to be making it so that real organic food is actually increasing in its availability in our food supply, and that we are actively working on having policies and programs that are helping that to happen.”

Pam Koch
I personally believe that too. I think that if we could make a change so that over the next couple of decades, more and more people were eating a higher and higher percentage of their diet as real organic food, we would be healthier. I think our rates of metabolic disease, cancer, and probably even mental health issues would start to come down. Do I have data that proves that? No. Do I believe that that’s what would happen if we were able to make that change? I do.

Dave Chapman
One famous paper that Joan wrote was about the “organic” Twinkie. I loved it. There was a debate that she had with somebody who was on the National Organic Standards Board, the NOSB. He was a prominent person in the organic food industry, and it was his contention that “Organic is not your mother, we’re not going to tell you what you can or can’t eat, and what’s wrong with an ‘organic’ Twinkie if it’s using all certified organic inputs and ingredients?”

Dave Chapman
Joan had a very different take on that. Do you know that issue well enough to reflect her thoughts?

Pam Koch
I think what she would say is that it’s completely missing the point of why we would want to have an organic system that is nourishing the soil and allowing people to have access to the whole real foods and real organic foods that are being grown around them.

Pam Koch
If what you’re trying to do is just remake the same food supply we have now, but just using certified organic ingredients, we’re missing the point of what was wrong with our food supply and why we are pushing to have more real organic food in our food supply.

Dave Chapman
Thank you, I think that’s so true. I know a lot of people in the organic world, and they always ask that question, “but how do we scale it?” Understandably, people are staring at this machine that is bearing down on them, and it’s so big. It’s unbelievably big, and they go, “Somehow we have to convince the machine to be more organic.”

Dave Chapman
I know somebody who’s worked on that for years. She was just fired by a major corporation. She was trying to create the change from within. Many people have done that. I can’t say you shouldn’t do that. I just say, “Good luck.” But the question of how we create change, and if we can do it by replication instead of scaling, is replicating something small so it repeats and repeats and repeats.

Dave Chapman
Leah Penniman said it rather beautifully when she was asked what she hoped her legacy would be in 100 years, as people look back at Soul Fire Farm. She said, “If we’re successful, no one will have heard of Soul Fire Farm, because there will be so many farms just like it all over the country. It will be lost in the ocean of something good.”

Dave Chapman
I think that was Joan’s vision also. Joan actually took this right down to the personal level. She kept a garden that she was quite serious about, and grew a lot of the food that she ate.

Pam Koch
Yes. Up until the last few years, which I think was a combination of, unfortunately, her being affected by climate change and the water table of the Hudson River going up below her garden, making it stay muddy after rains, and also her health. But yeah, she grew most of her own food, and it was great.

Pam Koch
I would stay at her house many nights during the summer, when our course was a Fall course, as we were going through and doing the readings, and it was amazing to be able to go out, pick food, and cook it right there.

Pam Koch
What you just said reminded me of a reading that has been in nutritional ecology, I think, since the very beginning. It’s called, “There’s a Morning War.” The morning war is the morning war that we all wake up with of should we feel hope or fear? This article is by somebody named Barbara Ward. She also went by Lady Bird Johnson. It was actually a speech that she gave to the Audubon Society.

Pam Koch
Somehow Joan got a typed copy of her speech and was able to put it in her book, “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology.” We still use it today. I often debate, and Joan and I would debate, “Do we keep it in?” Because it is now so old – when the students read it in 2026 it will be 53 years old.

Pam Koch
But what that morning war is really about is, do we believe that human ingenuity will have techno-fixes that will change all of our problems and make them better? Or do we actually really believe that we are reaching the limits and need to conserve, and that is what is important.

Pam Koch
What I have realized now, having read that article many times, every time that I teach the course, is there is very often when I’m having a conversation with someone and we just feel like we’re not connecting on an issue. Maybe it is, should hydroponics be organic?

Pam Koch
When I realize it, it’s that I am thinking of it in a systemic way, and that we have to conserve, and that we have to think of the ecosystem, and they are believing, “Well, we can have that techno-fix, we just might need to make hydroponics a little bit better or do something different.” That’s why we’re talking like this, and we’re not able to meet up.

Pam Koch
That’s the brilliance of that article, and it is kind of at the core of why it’s been so hard to make these changes that seem like they’re so logical. If it’s going to help people to be healthier, help the planet be healthier, help us to be more connected to our community, help make the conditions that people producing our food are working in better, the only reason we’re not doing it is profit.

Pam Koch
But I think the other thing that gets in the way is thinking, “Well, we’re so smart. Human ingenuity will fix it in the long run.” I don’t think it will. I think we’ve really reached the limits. I think conventional agriculture is a really great example of that. It hasn’t worked. It has worked to increase yields, but it hasn’t worked to nourish everyone at all, and it hasn’t worked to be good for the planet.

Dave Chapman
When you look at conventional chemical agriculture, is that strikingly clear to you now, as you studied this and you’re teaching it, and do you feel that the failures are so apparent and obvious?

Pam Koch
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in western Nebraska, which is corn country, and unlike Iowa, that part of Western Nebraska has been corn, corn, corn, corn for most of the last century plus. The last time I was there, which was 2017, the failures were pretty obvious.

Pam Koch
First of all, the Ogallala, which is what they rely on for water, is very low. There were signs everywhere about conserving water. The superweeds, despite the stacking of pesticides on the GMO crops, were above the corn. You would drive by corn fields, and instead of seeing that even row of corn at the top, you were seeing these weeds popping up all over the place.

Pam Koch
I believe that most of that corn that I was driving by as we were driving was probably GMO corn, just because that’s such a high percentage of the corn in our country. Those are signs that it is failing. Let alone the fact that what is that corn used for? It’s used to feed animals that could be fed by grazing, and that would be better for the environment and for the animals.

Pam Koch
It’s used to make ethanol, when there are many, many, many studies that show that the energy that is used to go from planting a corn seed to making ethanol is using more fossil fuels than we’re getting energy from it. That’s insanity. Then, of course, there’s a little bit of that corn that is used to go into our processed food products. What is that serving?

Pam Koch
It does seem really obvious to me that this system is not working on the farm anymore because we’ve depleted water, and we are not able to control weeds despite all the technology that’s gone into it, and we’re not doing anything that is actually nourishing the human body.

Dave Chapman
I’m sure you’ve thought about the farmers who are trapped in that system. Nobody got up in the morning and said, “I want to ruin the planet, or I want to destroy this farm.” Everybody’s intentions are great, and they want to make a living, but by and large, these are not wealthy people. They really are trying to make a living. I think the majority of them have at least one spouse who’s working outside of the farm in order to get by, to pay their bills.

Dave Chapman
How do we approach changing a system in which, essentially, these people are almost prisoners of that system? It’s very hard to change that. Indeed, even if it were possible financially, people won’t talk to you at their coffee shop. That’s a famous example, but I think it’s a true example. There’s a deep cultural tradition of obedience to the chemical companies. What do you do about that?

Pam Koch
I think it’s hard. I think we need to, one, learn from other countries. A student who took Nutritional Ecology with Joan and me got so into it that she ended up getting a doctorate in Europe, and her dissertation was on Denmark and France and farmers there who took on the government program that was encouraging them to switch to organic.

Pam Koch
So, it was the farmers who chose to do this, but the government was making it easy for them to switch to organic if they chose. It wasn’t forcing anyone to do that, and understanding the process that people took. I think we could learn from other countries where the government has helped people to make that transition to organic. I think we could also encourage people who are growing conventionally to try just doing something else small.

Pam Koch
That last time I was in Nebraska, I was staying in a home, and someone actually dropped off – literally, when we arrived at the home – what was clearly garden-grown vegetables: carrots that were all crooked, just things that were clearly from a garden. It was people who had a corn farm, who hadn’t had a home garden in a long time, doing it, and I heard that that same farmer was taking, I think, just five acres that were corn, which is a small amount of the total corn they had, and trying to grow tomatoes.

Pam Koch
Now I don’t know how they were growing the tomatoes, but that was at least a change. What I think, in our extremely hard-to-understand massive Farm Bill, is if we can have ways that encourage farmers to be able to transition to organic if they choose, and give them more programs that help them do that – I know there’s some in the organic title that helps farmers to do that – but growing that, and then even having farmers try to take even a small percentage of their land and try something different with it.

Pam Koch
The other thing that I think we can do, and this is also true in western Nebraska, is it’s right by the Sand Hills, and so there is actually still a lot of native prairie out there. There’s even today a push to plow up that native prairie and make it into corn. I think whatever we could do that would stop that, to keep at least everything that is still prairie as prairie, could help.

Pam Koch
We can’t change overnight – it would make an unstable condition – but I think we can figure out ways to just do a lot of different transitions that would decrease the amount of basically GMO corn and soy, which is the vast majority of corn land in our country now that is grown.

Pam Koch
I actually talked about this one time with someone who was in grain trade. I said, “How could we move in this direction?” Their first response to me was, which was so surprising, “Well, then where will that be grown?” They said, “Our whole entire trading system is set up for a certain number of bushels of corn and soy to be grown each year, so it’d have to go someplace else.”

Pam Koch
I was like, “No, no, no, just less, because we’re moving to more of other things.” It was almost like the person, in their worldview, couldn’t understand that we could actually even do that.

Dave Chapman
Yeah. I’d like to see that PhD thesis sometime, writing about the transitions in Denmark and France with a government that supported it. I know there’s considerable government support in the EU for transition to organic. They’ve taken it very seriously. It’s interesting to me, in this country, more recently, there started to be some support from Vilsack at the end of Biden’s administration. But where Congress is really excited is about the transition to regenerative, because the big chemical companies are excited about it too.

Dave Chapman
Who knows what it means, and because nobody knows what it means, what it means in practice is that for most of the farms, they are not really reducing their chemical input. They may be switching to no-till using a chemical herbicide or many herbicides to create that.

Dave Chapman
It seems like a very important moment that we might be missing in this country, where we’re seeing real, significant growth in organic in the EU, and especially in Denmark, Sweden, Austria is huge, France, and Germany. All of these are really seeing an increase in organic production.

Pam Koch
I don’t know if there’s a way to use what maybe sometimes we in our world don’t think of as good, like the American-first model. We’re falling behind in this area. If we believe the future has to be caring for our ecosystem and doing that through how we produce food, then we have to be moving in this direction. So, I don’t know if there’s a way to frame it so that we make this seem like we’re falling behind other countries, so we need to do this to catch up. I’m not sure.

Dave Chapman
That’s not a very popular conversation with the USDA. At this point, I think 40% of the vegetables that are sold in America are imported, and 60% of the fruits are imported, and 70% of the organic soy that’s sold in America is imported. About a third to a half of the organic corn is imported. These are unbelievable figures.

Dave Chapman
For soy, we export the majority of our conventional chemical crop, and yet somehow American farmers can’t get it together to grow it organically. It’s not true. We have excellent organic farmers, but the market is constantly destroyed by these low-cost inputs, which are suspicious about whether they are actually organic. But it’s certainly doing great destruction to the market.

Dave Chapman
How old was Joan when she stopped teaching?

Pam Koch
She stopped teaching in the fall of 2021, so she was 93 years old.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, 93 years old. Amazing. I interviewed her right around then, and she was still pretty darn sharp. I actually think my last interview with her was my favorite. It was really sweet. It was at her place in her inner house. It’s interesting. It seems like Joan was very upfront about her feelings and her opinions.

Dave Chapman
I loved the Dan Barber story at her memorial service, where Dan made a statement, and somebody got up and really challenged it in the room, and it was, I think, a fairly academic crowd. Some professor got up – and I think they were talking about organic agriculture – and said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. The whole world is going to starve if we listen to you.”

Dave Chapman
Dan was a bit crushed by it, and he went and told Joan about it and she said, “We’ll have to beep this.” But she said, “Oh, forget him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” You could see that that was so important for Dan to go, “Oh, my God. The honest truth,” which is that this person really was mistaken, even though they had great authority.

Dave Chapman
It reminded me of a Paul Hawken statement when he used to interview Frederick Stare, who was the head of nutrition at Harvard for about 40 years. They would trot Paul up and he would interview him in public forums, in the early days of organic.

Dave Chapman
Stare would just completely dismiss it. Paul said, “He won every debate, but I was always right.” It’s good to remember that you can be right and still not necessarily be able to stand up to an onslaught of proof and academia, which isn’t the whole truth.

Pam Koch
That is really, really good. All right. I have one story, but I feel like I’m going to think of another one too. With the Nutritional Ecology class, we were always evolving the class. Two of the sessions, one was called “The Food and People Dilemma.” It was, are we having too much population? Is that the problem or not enough food? It was debating that issue, which can be argued in a lot of ways.

Pam Koch
Then there was another session that was on our energy supply, and basically how we are getting energy, from fossil fuels and transitioning to other forms of energy. Joan and I were each working on those. She was working on the “Food and People” session, and I was working on the “Energy” session.

Pam Koch
Joan was upstairs in her home at her dining room table working, and I was downstairs. I had so many things that there’s a very large foyer with actually beautiful Italian tiles when you walk into her side door. I had so much that I decided that I needed to be on that floor to be able to sort all of the articles and figure out how to put things together. So, I literally just had the whole floor covered with articles.

Pam Koch
Joan was upstairs having exactly the opposite experience. There doesn’t seem to be anything new in this area. We’re not really talking about hunger in the same way that we were when there were so many famines and just a lot of changes.

Pam Koch
But she had read one article, and that was an article by Jonathan Latham called “How the Great Food War Will Be Won” in 2015. She said, “This is taking a different twist.” She literally walked down her stairs. As she was walking down, she said, “I’m frustrated. There doesn’t seem to be enough on this.”

Pam Koch
Then she comes upon me with papers everywhere, organized, but looking very disorganized. She said, “We need to rethink these two sessions. What’s going on in the world has changed, so we need to rethink this.” That’s then what we spent the rest of the day doing. That was probably about 2015, so that was 45 years into her teaching the course. I think it just shows that she was always, always learning.

Pam Koch
She would also very often read an article. It might have been that one by Barbara Ward that I talked about, that she had read so many times. She would say, “I had a new insight.” One of my favorite things about Joan is that she saw herself as always being a learner. She would even call me up sometimes and say that she had just read one of our students’ papers, and she would say, “That paper taught me something that I didn’t know before.” That was after 50 years of reading students’ papers.

Pam Koch
So, I think one of the many things that we can take away from Joan is that we all always have something to learn, even on topics that we may think we know a lot about.

Dave Chapman
Okay. We can’t do any better than that. Pam Koch, thank you so much. I don’t think we’re quite done, so maybe in a year from now, we’ll come back and have another conversation, because there are many things we didn’t get to. Thanks a lot. I enjoyed this.

Pam Koch
You’re welcome. With what’s going on in our federal government right now, there’ll be a lot to talk about.