Do you care what your fake food is called?

It's only a matter of time until the most viable meat alternative is a lab based, or animal free meat. Currently, there are a million options available for those who don't want to eat meat from killed animals, be it for ethical or environmental reasons, and most of them consist of using plant-based products to replicate meat.

These are all very lovely (now, they haven't always been!) but for some, they just don't cut the mustard. Some people will eat plant-based alternatives, but gravitate back to meat because they miss it. Some will just stick to meat because they like it, and that's that.

Many of these people say that if the meat based alternatives were more like the real thing, they would have less of an issue either partly or wholly shifting their diet.

Lab grown, or animal free, meat or seafood is essentially the meat you are used to but, rather than killing an animal that has used up masses and masses of resource, it's grown, in isolation, in a lab, using cells from the animal in question.

Does this sound appetising? Would it sound less appetising if it had a weird, alien, sciency name?

That's the question researchers in the States have been asking those who are interested. To avoid confusion, they spoke only about fish alternatives and asked participants to choose which, of a variety of presented options, they would rather the new food was called.

The terms tested were, “cell‐based seafood,” “cell‐cultured seafood,” “cultivated seafood,” and “cultured seafood”.

This was along with the phrases, “produced using cellular aquaculture,” “cultivated from the cells of ____,” and “grown directly from the cells of ____,” where the blanks are filled by the name of the seafood product.

To help, they were shown mock ups of what the packaging might look like.

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People were asked to consider what would allow them to easily see that it was cell based and not wild fish, to enable them to see possible allergens in it, whether it was an appropriate name to describe the process the food has been through, that didn't disparage the product or the meat it was trying to replicate, and that didn't paint the product in an unhealthy or unsafe light.

More than 3,000 people took part and were asked not only to choose which name they felt was best, but to choose which name best reflected each of the things they had been asked to consider.

The result, after a great number of measurements, was that 'Cell-based Seafood' was deemed to be the best name.

So that's that then.

You can read the paper here.