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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

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"?

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

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.

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