For final, I tried to explore the difference between artificial sausage casing and natural casing.

In the beginning I didn’t notice the differences between these two. The first time I bought only one box of sausage home and took the casing off, and thought that was nature casing. But the second time, I bought two different brand sausage back. When I took the casing off, and suddenly noticed that actually they are two different types of sausage casing. The one I used in the first trial, was the artificial casing. The new one I got, is the natural one. In the photo, the pinkish ones are the natural casing, and white ones are the artificial casing.

I did some research about the artificial casing, and found out actually some of the artificial casing are made by plastic as well.  It also could be made by collagen and cellulose. It’s pretty amazing for me to know that what we eat everyday actually are artificially food. I hope to research more about the advantage and disadvantage about them.

So I made two lamps with these two different materials. First two photos are the artificial casing. It’s very smooth, but not very strong. Very fragile when it dried up.

The next lamp was made by the natural casing. Compare with the artificial casing, the natural  casing is much more strong and  elastic.  After it dried up,  it’s still hard to break.  

For the next step, I want to explore more about the artificial casing. It’s very interesting to do some research about food safety. It’s also interesting to see how people make artificial food that taste exactly tastes like the natural food.