The Sausage Gets A Radical Redesign

Eating meat takes a serious toll on the environment. From energy and water to land and pollution, the world would be a much healthier place if the world’s millions of meat-eaters reduced the amount of meat in their diets.

For designer Carolien Niebling, the answer to reducing meat consumption is not cutting it out entirely or waiting for lab-grown meat startups to get the texture right. It’s expanding what we think of as protein. But her philosophy of increasing the types of food we eat has taken a rather surprising form: The sausage.

“At some point I tried to use live worms with the butchers,” Niebling says, referring to the master butcher with whom she worked for the project. “Those we didn’t try.”

Playing around with sausages doesn’t seem like your average design thesis, but Niebling insists that the sausage is the oldest designed food.

Because she used only traditional sausage-making techniques to make her sausages, Niebling says that any butcher would be able to make them without any extra equipment. “It’s about the reduction of meat,” she says. “Even if it’s 20% less meat, it’s quite an achievement. As soon as we start to eat less meat, we’re already on the right track.”

The aesthetic dimension to the project is striking as well. Niebling worked with two photographers in order to ensure the sausages were captured in their full glory. Photographer Emile Barret created collages of ingredients used in the sausages, while photographer Jonas Marguet shot a series of images meant to represent what Niebling calls “the character” of the sausages. “You see a bold manly sausage, or a more delicate sausage with the berry jelly, that’s more mysterious,” she says. Niebling hopes people look beyond the sausage ick factor and embrace her philosophy around eating less meat.

“I so badly want to take this bad stigma we have on sausages,” she says. “They need to introduce themselves into the world.”