How to Check if a cell equals a word in a table

Does anyone know how to check a string in a cell in a table to detect if it is a specific word? For example, I have a table that has a bunch of rows. In each row is 1 word. I want to figure out how often a word appears in the table for a specific column.

My approach was to use a while loop with an if statement that would increase a variable every time the logic returned true. The logic is supposed to return true if the cell in the table is a specific string such as 'Aluminum' or 'plastic'. However, MATLAB does not allow me to use the == operator in a table. Does anyone know if there is a workaround?

My approach that did not work

x = readtable('litterati_processed_data.csv')

y = 1;
paper = 0;
otherstuff = 0;
while  y <= 5936
    if x(y, 11) == 'paper'
        paper = paper + 1;
    else
      otherstuff = otherstuff + 1;  
    end
    y + 1;
end

Answer 1

[Matt J]

As an example,

x=cell2table({'dog','paper','cat','fish','paper'}.')

x = 5×1 table
      Var1   
    _________

    {'dog'  }
    {'paper'}
    {'cat'  }
    {'fish' }
    {'paper'}

paper=nnz( string(x{:,1})=="paper")

paper = 2

 
 otherstuff=size(x,1)-paper,

otherstuff = 3