Signals & Stats

Meat of the sea

By Sophie Holmes 22 : 06 : 2016 London : Whole-system Thinking : Central Saint Martins

London – Sea-Meat Seaweed is a Central Saint Martins graduate project that explores the art of butchery in a post-meat world.

Material Futures MA graduate Hanan Alkouh draws comparisons between dulse, an edible red seaweed, and pork
Alkouh believes that eating meat is no longer sustainable due to the environmental impact of meat production

Sea-meat Seaweed by Hanan Alkouh, London. Photography by Sara Abou Saleh

Sea-meat Seaweed by Hanan Alkouh, London. Photography by Hung-chun Wang

Sea-meat Seaweed by Hanan Alkouh, London. Photography by Tom Mannion

Sea-meat Seaweed by Hanan Alkouh, London. Photography by Hung-chun Wang

Sea-meat Seaweed by Hanan Alkouh, London. Photography by Niloufar Esfandiary

Alkouh’s project acknowledges that if people stop eating meat, a whole culture surrounding meat production and preparation would be lost.

Alkouh uses dulse seaweed, which looks like meat and tastes like bacon when fried, to replicate the aesthetics and language used by the pig industry. For the project, first seen at Milan Design Week, she created butcher shop-style sculptures and fake carcasses made of dulse. These were presented alongside a written narrative about the production and farming of the seaweed, using language typically associated with butchery and the meat industry.

‘The objective is to point out the collective social values and innate behaviour tied to the skills around meat production that would be jeopardised in a post-meat world, to ensure their adaptive proliferation,’ explains Alkouh.

The Big Picture

Consumers understand the importance of environmentally friendly products and are now looking for sustainable alternatives, as we revealed in our macrotrend Whole-system Thinking.