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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

If the cells came from salmon, and it's made to look like salmon, I don't particularly see why we can't call it salmon.

Could we call it "Fermented salmon tumor"?

"Fermented Salmon" sounds funny and relatively accurate to me. Why do you call it a tumor? Are the cells cancerous?

Multicellular life naturally exists in a well-ordered matrix according to a rough plan, not a blob in a petri dish, and when it deviates too much from that plan we have various pejorative words for it and feel various health consequences as a result of disordered growths.

Tissue culture in general is more like cancer than not like cancer, even when using "non-cancerous" cell lines. But cancerous and "immortalized" cell lines are particularly useful in cell culture because they don't snuff themselves out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

tumor (noun) An abnormal growth of tissue resulting from uncontrolled, progressive multiplication of cells and serving no physiological function; a neoplasm

'benign tumor' maybe some Salmon Lipomas with crackers and cheese.

If I make a fish potato cake in the shape of a snapper can I call it "snapper"?

Sure. I'm comfortable either reading the description on a menu or the packaging it presumably comes in to determine what I'm actually getting.

So why not just call it "vegetable and lab grown salmon cells"?

I think that example wasn't the best as it's probably so obvious it isn't salmon it wouldn't fool anyone. But would you be comfortable if someone sold Hoki or Puffer Fish as Salmon? And then only in the fine print said it was actually Hoki that tasted like salmon or whatever. What if someone sold actual fish but called it Tofu, and only disclosed in the description that it was fish that tasted like Tofu?

That is a world I don't want to live in.

Almost every sushi restaurant in North America sells “crab” that contains 0% crab. Very few people seem to make a fuss about this.

I must admit I didn't know that. Do you think that is widely known amongst people who eat them? But yes, either way, I find that disturbing.

… and it must be clearly labeled as imitation crab on the menu. They cannot just call it “crab”.

Very few people realize what they’re actually eating, I fear.

You already live in that world and don't seem to know it.

It does seem so.

To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.

"I can't believe it's not butter" product

Or as my brother and I called it, "Ick-bihn-buh" — enunciating the "ICBINB" acronym.

The proof-of-concept marketing name "I Can't Believe It's Not Salmon" illustrates the fundamental problem here. Can lab-grown salmon be labeled as just plain "salmon"? Can it reside in the meat department right next to farm-raised and wild-caught salmon fillets? Does it always have to be prepended with "cultivated"?

If you use the quotation marks on the menu then yes! ‘Fish’ and ‘chips’ hahah.

It’s kinda like how they’ve started calling chocolate type products that have never seen a cocoa bean ‘chocolatey’.

Do we accept we are in a dystopia yet?

Sure, I think that's fine and helpful when places do that - and in fact not dystopian. These things are about explaining what taste/texture/etc a dish is trying to convey.

They’re trying to cut corners and swindle inattentive buyers. That’s it.

That is not it, and throwing short inflammatory comments up and down this comment chain isn't going to do much except clutter it up.

(Almost nobody who goes in to a restaurant is fooled by "Fish" in quotation marks on the menu; it's an alarming enough call-out to make anyone aware of it)

If you make a cheesy cracker and call it a Goldfish, nobody gets too upset.

Wait until you hear about Gummy Bears.

Because consumers have a reasonable expectation that the foods that they buy and eat are called the words that they've come to expect them to be called and not some sort of laboratory grown facsimile.

We have had re-use of words in food for ages now and it's not a particularly big problem.

If a consumer has an expectation that what they're eating and drinking are specific things, they would be well served by learning to read the label(s). Nobody is serving these things outside of niche restaurant experiences and calling them the exact same thing as their OG counterparts.

Why are you defending corporations who thrive on the for-profit deception of consumers?

It's a neat trick, wording-wise, to try and make it out like I'm doing that. It's fairly clear that I'm not doing that.

e.g, Almond _milk_ has been a thing for centuries now. Everyone knows it's not from a cow, yet we call it milk because the end product is similar enough that people get what the point is. Humanity will likely do this until the heat death of the universe. You should probably just get over it.

Yes, word tricks are the problem. They deceive.

That's... not even a real response to my comment.

If you're going to be this disingenuous then I'm not going to bother responding past this. shrug

"cultivated" is a reasonable label for these things. So "cultivated salmon" is a concise and accurate description of what is being served.

And it's listed as cultivated on the menus of the restaurants they list on their site.

Cultivated seems misleading since it sounds like it’s a real fish from a fish farm.

We have the word "farmed" for that.

"cultivated" is not meant to mislead, it's meant to find an agreeable label that communicates the product provenance.

Fully agreed.

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