Graduated from Swiss design school ECAL, product designer Carolien Niebling has realized ‘The Future Sausage’ project, presented during Milan Design Week 2017, that tends to change our dietary habits. Collaborating with master butcher Herman Ter Weele and molecular chef Gabriel Serero, Niebling has designed a beautiful series of original sausages. If you’re not comfortable with insect-based recipes, they are also carrot, apricot, and coconut sausage, berry, date, and almond sausage or vegetable mortadella. Because she used only traditional sausage-making techniques to make her sausages, any butcher would be able to make them without any particular equipment.
If the world’s millions of meat-eaters don’t reduce the amount of meat in their diets, meat may be scarce soon. Indeed, eating meat causes a serious impact on the environment, including energy, water and pollution. Not to mention industrial processes, sometimes disastrous to produce excessively, compelling people to consume ever more.
Photo by Noortje Knulst
“A sausage is as much a design object as a chair,” she says. “If you’re designing a chair, you’re looking at what company you’re doing it for, what material you want to build the chair with. With food, it’s similar. You look at the history and the function, you’re going to source the materials.”
Although many health surveys show that meat consumption slightly decreases, whether it’s cultural or by simple pleasure, it’s hard to move away from our consumption habits. All the history of sausage and production methods are developed in a book, explaining how the sausage can evolve in the future. We know that meat is source of protein, but it’s far from being the only way out. Pulse crops, tofu, seeds or dried fruits, be open to alternative solutions and ‘Eat different’!
Still life Photography by Jonas Marguet
Anatomical Photography by Younes Klouche
Collages Photography by Emile Barret