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
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?
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"?
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.
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)
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.
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.
