Crafting with food waste: makers reimagine discarded meat

In the first of a series of articles, we meet craft innovators who are taking leftovers from food production and transforming them into recycled materials and products – starting with projects that seek to tackle the controversial meat industry.

About 150 billion farm animals are slaughtered every year for food, and the body parts that don’t make it to our plates and can’t be used in animal feed, fertilisers or nonedible goods – such as lungs, bones, gristle, hooves, skin, blood – end up in landfill or sewers. It’s no surprise that the vegan movement is growing. But with demand for meat expected to double by 2050, animal waste is a problem that’s not going away soon.

‘I saw cow stomachs for the first time in a market in Italy, boiled and presented on ice,’ says Amsterdam-based designer Billie van Katwijk. ‘I didn’t know what they were, so I found them fascinating and beautiful.’ What emerged from that encounter was Ventri, a leather made from a part of the animal that’s generally thrown away. ‘Personally, I don’t eat meat, but as long as this industry is there I don’t want to ignore it,’ she says.

It is hard to imagine the demand for cow stomachs ever outweighing our appetite for their flesh, but Van Katwijk is conscious of the ethical questions surrounding her choice of raw material, which she sources directly from abattoirs. She has been cautious not to disguise it in the process of tanning and crafting: the leather, which she has used to make a collection of handbags, is conspicuously intestine-like – mottled, organic and coloured to resemble the stomachs themselves, so as not to give anyone the opportunity to ignore its origins and the questions that come with it.

Does the very concept of devising new ways to use body parts perpetuate the meat industry, or does it make us more mindful of the value of animal lives? By making beautiful objects, are we continuing to aestheticise death or are we simply taking seriously our duty to make full use of creatures that are slaughtered?

Projects such as Blood Related by German designer Basse Stittgen, a series of vessels made from heated, dried and moulded cow blood, strive to problematise rather than highlight the potential of materials derived from animals. ‘One of my questions was: can blood be just another biomaterial?’ he says. ‘I came to the conclusion that by using it, it’s easy to become instrumental in the very industry you’re trying to criticise.’ The collection is designed for display in exhibitions, rather than for sale, often shown alongside a recording of a cow’s heartbeat.

Clemence Grouin-Rigaux, who completed her master’s at Central Saint Martins in 2019, takes a different stance. ‘I’m not pro the meat industry, but we are going to continue to consume meat for at least 60 to 70 years,’ she says. Her graduation project, Hidden Beauty, is a series of personal items – brushes, soap, a comb – made from the bones and skins of a pig, cooked in a water bath, mixed with glycerine, coloured with blood powder or bone char, then dried in moulds. ‘This is a problem of the present, which is impacting our planet – not a solution for the future.’

The ideas pervading this field of design echo those of the nose-totail eating movement, pioneered by chef Fergus Henderson. Both take inspiration from a time when animal farming was done on a smaller scale and it was considered good sense to use all parts of a slaughtered beast. This kind of thinking is visible in 374, a project by British designer Alice V. Robinson, the daughter of a vet. She has created a range of leather accessories made from a single animal, whose meat was also served as part of a dinner at the museum. ‘By working with one bullock, I aim to acknowledge the life behind the products we are so often disconnected from,’ she writes.

A return to smaller-scale farming and a more efficient, holistic system of processing are two potential pathways to minimising the quantity of animal products that are disposed of – and both seem to chime with the ethos of craft and its focus on the bespoke, customised and material-led. The ethical questions surrounding meat production itself, however, are certain to continue.

This is an extract from an article that first appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Crafts magazine