Glazed pork chops, sizzling bacon, a gargantuan slab of spare ribs ? increasingly, people are choosing to buy these succulent staples from sustainable meat farms instead of choosing industriallly processed meat. The New York City Meat Hackathon is saluting this trend a three-day event, beginning today, where farmers, butchers, tech mavens, policymakers and entrepreneurs ? all ?steakholders? ? will confer on potential improvements in the ways that livestock is farmed and meat is processed and consumed.
It?s ?hacking? in the creative sense, said Chris Hunt of the Grace Communications Foundation, one of the event?s sponsors. The goal, he said, is to deconstruct the challenge and come up with do-it-yourself solutions based on existing technology. (Hacking of the traditional variety will also be involved: a pig-butchering demo is part of the lineup at the event, to be held in the experimental workspace known as Grind at 419 Park Avenue South, near 29th Street.)
The annual food-themed hackathon, the third to be held in New York to date, invites participants including the general public to match their skills sets to specific challenges in the hope of inventing prototype tools or technologies. This is the first one devoted to meat; in previous years the focus was on food in general and then on using data visualization to explore the subject.
The winning hack will receive both $2,500 to help make his or her solution a reality and expert guidance on promoting the idea.
?There are big challenges that are faced by sustainable meat producers and sustainable meat consumers,? Mr. Hunt said. Sustainable meat is loosely characterized as meat from pasture-dwelling animals that were not fed hormones or antibiotics.
Rather than campaigning for reforms in the industrial meat industry, the organizers want to find strategies for bolstering the sustainable sector. Challenges include educating consumers on finding sustainably farmed goods, reading labels in supermarkets, and understanding the environmental impact of factory farms. The industrial meat sector, which relies on antibiotics to counter often-unhygienic conditions, promotes the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can make human illnesses harder to treat. And then there?s pollution, from methane emissions to industrial runoff.
By the same token, sustainable producers have much to learn about labeling a chunk of meat to make its origins clearer. For consumers, ?things like labels are very confusing,? Mr. Hunt said.
Other themes include food safety, animal welfare and improving efficiency in the processing and production of sustainably farmed meat.
?The industrial meat system has a very well established and sophisticated distribution network,? Mr. Hunt noted, which makes its products more accessible and cheaper than the sustainable variety.
That?s a challenge that one participant, the digital developer Will Turnage, is eager to pursue at the hackathon. He said that inventory management on sustainable farms is still an antiquated process. ?A lot of slaughterhouses are still run by a guy with a pad and paper,? he said. ?To me it?s really about improving the speed and the workflow.?
Technology could help accomplish that. Mr. Turnage mentioned the potential for cellphone apps that could change the way inventories are updated.
Organizers suggest that such efforts could ultimately influence the industrial meat sector to adopt more sustainable practices as well. ?I think something like this hackathon helps to promote that sort of transition,? Mr. Hunt said.
In addition to Grace, the event is sponsored by the media research group Food+Tech Connect and Applegate, the organic meat purveyor.
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