Sharing the bounty of knowledge.

Which is why I got excited when I learned about Washington, D.C.-based John Reinhardt and the urban agriculture zoning and food sovereignty ordinance maps recently launched on his blog Grown in the City. Among other things covered, Reinhardt and his cousin Bob Wall are using technology to help people understand urban agriculture and food sovereignty policy approaches across the United States. Grown in The City’s new iTools column focuses on educating urban agriculturists of all kinds on how they can use open source technology to better communicate food policy and urban planning data, reviews tools, and highlights other resourceful websites.

My interview with Reinhardt gives insight into the maps, why open-source data is crucial for optimizing policy decision-making, and the food and tech trends that he’s most excited about.

John Reinhardt.Q. How did an urban planner get interested in food and tech?

A. I’ve always been interested in a variety of topics: gardening, food, media, technology, sociology, architecture … I think it’s partly why I became an urban planner (an interdisciplinary profession that potentially touches on all of these topics and more). So, I think a better way to answer your question is that I became interested in urban planning through my interests in food and tech (and everything else related to cities).

Growing up in Staten Island, my family kept a kitchen garden, and this made a huge impression on me. At the same time, four years at a science and tech high school, followed by an undergrad in interdisciplinary humanities and communication gave me all the skills to succeed as an urban planner — which included courses in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), computer graphics, database analysis, and other “techie” things.

It wasn’t until the end of my formal urban planning coursework at Penn that I discovered the burgeoning specialty of food systems planning, through the work of Domenic Vitiello, who guest lectured in a sustainable development class. My interest in the topic led me to start Grown in the City, which sits squarely at the intersection of food systems, urban planning, design, gardening, and policy.

Q. Could you tell us about Grown In The City’s weekly iTools column?

A. The weeky iTools column is a chance to explicitly link the urban agriculture community and the technology community. As I’ve seen over the past few years, many large companies such as IBM, Seimens, and GE are starting to focus on “smart city” technology. At the same time, individuals now have the tools to develop iPhone applications, websites, blogs, and other outlets to share information. iTools is the nexus between the techology, the policy, and the practice.

The column is written by Bob Wall, a veteran programmer, who saw a gap between the users and creators of technology. He’ll be covering a variety of topics — how to integrate open source technology into food policy and planning blogs, reviews of applications that make urban gardening easier, and even highlights of other websites that are using neat technologies (and how they’re doing it). It is hopefully a very empowering column for people who may not have much of a tech background and an eye opener for those who do.

Q. What are your goals with the “Interactive Urban Agriculture Zoning Map” and ”Interactive Food Sovereignty Ordinance Map”? Why did you choose mapping as a medium for achieving these goals?

A. The interactive maps were designed to track the urban agriculture zoning and food sovereignty movements. As an urban planner, you learn that how you communicate data is extremely important, and the clean, easy-to-use maps provide immediate visual information (e.g., which states have the most ordinances) while making the information easy to access (just click on your state!). For example, by looking at the Urban Ag Zoning map, you can quickly see that there aren’t many policies in the Rocky Mountain Region. It may inspire people in those states who may want to do some digging on their own to see if the policies exist, or even go as far as to propose them if they don’t.

You could say that this fascination with visually-represented data goes back to my GIS roots, but I think it’s also a really effective way for people who have no real interest in how the technology works to just click on their state and get the info they need. In that respect, I think it straddles both sides of food + tech. We’re currently working on drilling down to the ZIP code level, and up to the global scale, but that’s still some time off.

Q. What does “open source data sharing” mean to you? Why is it important?

A. Open source data sharing means that the data is available for everyone to download, analyze, update, and contribute to. This is extremely important given the high speed of change in technology, and the speed of change in the current world of policy. By keeping the data open source, it can be consistently updated and analyzed to help policy makers make the best decisions possible in real-time.

In addition, by creating a data hub, we hope to help spur creative thinking and foster critical thinking about the policy approaches taken by different state and local governments. Our current maps are not updated in real time and focus as more of a data-hub, but we are looking at ways to push the envelope, and really welcome suggestions for what would make useful tools, maps, and resources.

Q. How are you incentivizing users to contribute data to the maps? What portion of the maps are user-contributed data?

A. We’re hoping that users contribute data because it’s something they really care about, and we’re trying to make it as easy as possible. Users don’t have to register or fill out any complicated forms to submit data. It goes directly into our database system (which is linked to the map), where someone moderates it for quality and accuracy before posting.

Currently, most of the food sovereignty map is user-submitted (we started off with only one local ordinance — Sedgwick, Maine — and the map now includes a dozen or so state and local laws). The urban ag zoning map started from a base dataset, but we’ve had 5-10 new submissions in the week it’s been live.

The urban agriculture/food systems/urban planning community is a very dedicated group (just check out the COMFOOD listserv), so I see Grown in the City’s role as providing easy, well designed, good looking, open source tools for people to share data with.

Q. What excites you the most about the way that tech are being leveraged to affect the food system?

A. I think what excites me most is how the internet functions. We see all the time the internet can be used as a “flashpoint” for transmitting memes — everything from Charlie Sheen to Rebecca Black can become the talk of the town (or the world) overnight. In a smaller, kinder way, I think we’ve seen this with some really interesting urban agriculture stories. The story on Maine food sovereignty has been shared over 1,300 times on Facebook since it was published 10 days ago and was even picked up by Mark Bittman of The New York Times. In that respect, I think new technologies are an incredible media tool for telling the stories we all care about so passionately to a wider audience.

In terms of how we are using technology? Tools such as smart phones, which seem to be in the hands of everyone these days, can be used to collect more and better data about our food system in relatively non-intrusive ways. Just think if everyone was entering information about how much and what type of produce they consumed, how much water they used to water their gardens, or what they were growing in their community gardens? Having such data would allow us to get a much clearer picture of the local food systems around us and what our impacts are. But I think it’s not too far off, given the new tools we’re seeing.

I think the future is one where technology, metrics, and real-time measurement of our impacts are just part of daily life. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, but it sure is interesting!

Would you try a slice of human cheese?

I’ve asked this question at a dinner of artists and sustainable food advocates, at dinner with my family, and in conversation with friends. There are the brave few who say they’d be interested in tasting some, but most people react in utter disgust.

After the shock of imagining what it would be like to consume cheese made from human milk, the real question becomes: Why does it make us so uncomfortable?

A Human Cheese tasting at Postmasters Gallery. (Photo by Miriam Simun.)

New York University graduate student Miriam Simun created her Human Cheese project as a way to engage people in conversation about biotechnology, food systems, and the human body. The project originated as part of Marc Alt’s Living Systemscourse at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, but she plans to continue her research.

I usually focus on information technology, but I was particularly interested in Simun’s innovative approach to exploring the ethics of biotechnology and sustainable food production. She pushes the boundaries in the already contentious and topical conversation of biotechnology, and I wanted to have my assumptions challenged.

How about you? Does the idea of human cheese fascinate or disgust you? Can you articulate why?

Read about Simun’s approach, then share your thoughts below.

Q. What was the inspiration for creating human cheese?

A. I love cheese. I’ve been trying to eat better recently, and there’s so many different considerations that go into “better” food — organic, natural, local, sustainable, free-range, ethical, fair trade. It’s really overwhelming. It makes buying a wedge of cheese this complicated endeavor. So I started thinking: What would be the most natural, local, ethical cheese possible?

Q. How do people respond to your project?

A. It definitely runs the gamut. Everything from “this is such a great idea” to “this is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” Overall, response has been pretty overwhelmingly positive, which I didn’t really expect. Maybe it’s New York — we’re pretty adventurous eaters.

Human cheese is initially a pretty shocking concept to most people. In that way its a great conversation starter — people very quickly bring up all sorts of different issues. I’ve had questions come up like, is it OK for a vegan? Is it empowering or exploitative of the woman? Is it dangerous, or actually healthier?

Many people feel uncomfortable because they don’t know the woman, or what she is eating — but how often do you know the cows whose milk make your cheese, and what they are eating? The sustainability question is great, too, a lot of people totally get it, they love that I’m using human extracts to make human food, while others think of cannibalism. But the best is when people are tasting it (or not). There’s something really visceral and instinctual about eating. It’s no longer an idea to play with, but something you have to chew and swallow.

Q. Where did you procure the milk? How expensive was it?

Breast-milk in the freezer waiting to be turned into cheese. (Photo by Miriam Simun.)

A. I used two different sources. One woman lives here in New York, and she very kindly donated it to me — she has been overproducing, filling up her freezer, and was finding it painful to just throw it away. I purchased the milk from the another woman, and she shipped it to me in ice, from Wisconsin. I am working to make a delicious Wisconsin human cheddar. I found both the women on an online marketplace for breast milk — where women regularly arrange to sell and donate their milk. It’s pretty interesting: women set the price of their breast milk depending on if they provide blood work, and also the health of their diet.

I am currently looking for more New York City–based women who are interested in working with me.

Q. You pose some really fascinating questions in the description of your project, quoted below. Can you share what, if any, resolution you came to about each?

As global urban populations increase, developing nations industrialize, and energy, water and land become ever more scarce resources, how will we redesign our food systems to produce healthier, kinder, more sustainably and efficiently produced food?

I’m realizing just how hard it is to create a sustainable food within our current system. The infrastructure we’ve built makes it so much easier to participate in the global system than the local one. One of my goals is to make 100 percent local NYC cheese (especially borough-specific: I would love to see the Manhattan vs. Brooklyn Cheese-Off). To be truly local cheese, it must include not just the milk, but also other ingredients (salt, enzyme, etc.) coming from NYC, as well as all the tools and energy used in the process.

Well, I can source milk from midtown, transport it by bicycle, cook it over a fire — but where do I find vegetarian rennet, or a stainless steel pot manufactured in NYC? And that’s not even getting into the food the woman consumed to make the milk.

As we navigate the complex landscape of technologically modified food production, how do we understand what is natural, healthy, ethical?

As far as “healthier” and “kinder” — I think those are actually a bit easier than the sustainability question. They do require dedication, time, and expense. This is in large part due to the way our food systems have been created and regulated, in which unhealthy and/or unethically produced food tends to be cheaper. But this is our food — the substance we are putting inside our bodies. I can’t think of many things more worthy of our time, money, energy.

What we understand to be natural and healthy changes easily, and is often a sign of the times. What is healthy, exactly: Low fat? Organic? Sugar free? Wild-caught? What is natural also stumps me — I mean, farming is a technology, one of the first — so is only wild-growing food actually natural? That’s pushing it to the extreme, but a useful one to think through our definitions of “natural” and “organic.”

Our ideas about what is natural fluctuate easily — it’s fascinating to watch this with Human Cheese. Many people’s immediate reaction is almost visceral, they exclaim “Ooh!” or “Gross!” Often those very same people within 5 minutes start nodding their head and saying “OK, yeah, that makes sense … “

Human cheese is in a particularly interesting place — eating human milk after you’re done being a baby, especially from someone other than your mother, is such a huge taboo
– and yet, human milk is arguably the most natural food in the world. Certainly drinking milk meant for other animal’s babies is kind of strange. Unnatural? The great thing about food is that it elicits something visceral — so suddenly you are dealing with these ideas not just rationally, but your body is often responding physically in some way.

The ethics question is a complicated one that I don’t have the answer to. I actually struggle a lot with this issue. Many of people have asked me if I plan on starting a Human Cheese business, or suggest that I do. What would that mean? I am currently producing ethically sourced, boutique human cheese — if it were for sale it would be incredibly expensive.

Does food have to be affordable to be ethical? Affordability, then, often requires large-scale production. But thinking about a large-scale industrialized production in this case, you quickly arrive at the exploitation of poor mothers, who might sell their milk and use formula for their children. An unsettling thought, but how does it compare to the current practice of women in India renting their uteruses to Western couples for in-vitro fertilization, and being confined behind gates for nine months until they deliver the child? These women make the decision to do this, in exchange for around $7,000. Is it exploitation? I’m not sure.

Making human cheese has brought me closer to these questions, even if I still don’t see a clear answer. I hope that for others, deciding to eat or not eat the cheese made from women’s milk might bring these kinds of questions closer to home. As technology makes new uses of the human body possible, and new foods possible, what are we comfortable with? What do we want?

As humanity gains the power to design life on molecular, genetic, and even nano level, how do we, as a species, develop ethics to guide our design of living systems?

This question is a central one in my work. I have just started to scratch the surface of what this means with the people I’ve had a chance to talk to over some cheese. I can say that ethics seem to be pretty heavily tied into our ever-fluctuating idea of “normal.” I’m really eager to continue thinking through these questions over more cheese and wine.

Q. What’s next?

A. A lot! I have a 100 percent pure human cheese in the works. [She currently blends it with goat or cow milk.]  It’s a bit tricky, but experimentation is under way. I’m also spending some time this winter seeking out more collaborators — mothers, scientists, cheese makers — food making is, after all, the oldest social ritual and much better done in groups. I also have a series of human cheese tastings coming up this winter and spring. [See her website for more information.]

Q. What was the most interesting or unexpected thing you learned throughout this experience?

A. The culture that exists around making food with breast milk — women make bread, yogurt, ice cream, soup … you name it. I never expected it. Cheese is a bit more complicated, because of the unique properties of human milk. But it’s great to know that I’m not too off-base with human cheese — in some ways, I’m just bringing a niche food product to the mainstream. Kind of like caviar.

For more crazy food news on Grist, check out:

• Bunnies: They’re what’s for dinner
• How to date a vegan
• Worms are the latest sustainable meat
• Organic milk really is better for you

A version of this post was first published at Food + Tech. Used with permission.