There are reasons beyond animal welfare to find meat alternatives, though. If the rest of the world’s rapidly increasing population went through meat at the rate we Americans do (we consumed 92.3 billion lbs. from 9 billion animals in 2011 alone), we’d soon run out of animals to butcher — or at least the space and the feed to raise them. There are also big environmental and health concerns in industrial meat production, from the run-off and greenhouse gases emanating from toxic manure to the antibiotics used to keep livestock upright.

Creating an in-vitro meat supply might seem like the answer to all those problems, but we’re still years away from seeing viable, affordable artificial meat – and probably many more years from convincing the public to eat it. But what if we could use technology in other ways to cut our dependence on natural meat?

In New York this weekend, a gaggle of tech entrepreneurs, software developers, butchers, farmers, food industry executives and health policy wonks are gathering to brainstorm the issue of meat. Held by the blog Food+Tech Connect and called Hack//Meat, the hackathon’s goal is to come up with technological answer to the problems of meat supply, processing, distribution, health and ultimately consumption. One of big problems the group will tackle is how — simply put — to get people to eat less meat.

One of the more interesting proposals to come out of Hack//Meat is from Foodpairing, a food industry research company and app developer. Foodpairing has broken down flavor to its molecular components and has compiled databases that can match the flavor of those ingredients against other completely different ingredients. By compiling “foodpairing trees” its technology can identify vegetable or seafood ingredients that reinforce the flavor of different meats, or in some cases, can act as a substitute for a meat entirely. AS Foodpairing co-owner Bernard Lahousse wrote on Food+Tech Connect:

The flavor molecules of an ingredient are not unique to that specific ingredient. Basil doesn’t taste like basil because there is only one basil flavor, but because there is a blend of flavor molecules, many of which you can also find in other ingredients. The same is true for meats like chicken. The flavor of chicken contains about 20 important flavor molecules, some of them you can find in coffee, bread, potato, mushroom, etc.

While these kind of techniques have been applied in haute cuisine’s molecular gastronomy for awhile, Lahousse is proposing that they can be applied on a mass market scale, and not in the sense of just substituting a vegetable patty for a beef patty or tofu for a chicken strip. By adjusting recipes and cooking techniques to include ingredients that reinforce the meat flavors we love, we can enjoy the same cuisine while minimizing — if not eliminating entirely — the actual amount of meat used.

Meat structure image courtesy of Georgia Institute or Technology

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Report: An Open Source Smart Grid Primer

Sounds outlandish, but some day we may be making use of 3D printers to manufacture the most consumable of consumer goods: our food. Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs has just funneled $350,000 into Modern Meadow, a startup attempting to combine 3D printing with in-vitro meat cultivation. The end result would be a steak you can print out from biological materials.

Creepy? Yes, but it could be the direction the world is heading if the population keeps growing and our hunger for hamburgers, chicken tenders and pork chops doesn’t abate. On a per-capita consumption basis, the amount of arable land required to feed and raise livestock is much higher than that required to grow crops for the dinner table. If we want to keep meat in our diets but maintain a sustainable food supply we may well be sourcing our steaks from the lab (or the copy machine).

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• Defining success for cleantech companies