[Zababa]

There's nothing to represent a dish that went into the oven, there's no leek, no aspergus, no cooked meat outside of a poultry leg, some cartoonish meat on bone and bacon, only one type of cheese that's again a cartoonish cheese wedge, no cereal except for rice and an ear of corn, no zucchini, no nuts except the peanut, no round bread (not round flatbread, more like sourdough), no pasta except for spaghetti, no fish outside of very specific dishes, no soup. That's without thinking too much about it.

It's a very "I live in the city and mostly eat outside, often at ethnic food places" centric vision of food.

Edit: there's nothing wrong with living in the city and mostly eating outside, often at ethnic food places. But it's erasing a lot of people.

[bonoboTP]

Emoji don't erase people. Erasing people is a very strong word and should be reserved for serious use.

[genewitch]

There's bok choy though!

[Zababa]

Of course there is, because it's on the menu of that nice asian place that's within walking distance of the offices of everyone working on the Unicode Standard. For all that talk about inclusion for the pregnant man/pregnant person, the exclusion on things as basic as food is baffling. It's very nice that you can express "pregnant man" with an emoji. It's very weird that you can't express "furnace".

[run-types]

I love how your reasoning for the inclusion of Bok Choy is because there are Asian restaurants in SF, rather than the fact that it's one of the most popular vegetables in the most populous country on Earth.

[Zababa]

That's because there is no appearence of other fundamentals of Chinese cuisine. There's no pork meat!

[run-types]

https://emojipedia.org/bacon/

https://emojipedia.org/pig/

https://emojipedia.org/pig-nose/

[genewitch]

Technically if you "search" your emojis for "bok" and then "lettuce" the same emoji appears. My first guess was that bok choy meant "leafy green" but it means "White Vegetable". I actually had this discussion yesterday, otherwise i wouldn't have known bok choy was an emoji at all.

[run-types]

If leek and asparagus are your biggest omissions, then I think they've done a pretty good job at representing food. The point isn't to have photo-realistic illustrations of every possible food. Instead, they're trying to create a useful set of pictographic primitives that can be used for communication for everyone person on Earth. Even if they had photo-realistic emojis of every cut of meat, it wouldn't be that useful.

[Zababa]

> If leek and asparagus are your biggest omissions, then I think they've done a pretty good job at representing food.

That's a strawman, I've cited lots of other things. My point isn't that I can show a leek, my point is that with these emojis, you can maybe cover what 10% of the population on Earth eats, and most of that will be people living in big cities in developped countries .

> The point isn't to have photo-realistic illustrations of every possible food. Instead, they're trying to create a useful set of pictographic primitives that can be used for communication for everyone person on Earth.

They failed at that. How would you express food cooked in an oven? You can't. There's not even an oven emoji. The food emojis are showing that there is a huge biais for the kind of people that would contribute to the emoji standard, which is again, people living in big cities in developed countries. It's like if someone says "English is universal, everyone I know can understand it". No it's not, it's just the bubble of that person.

> Even if they had photo-realistic emojis of every cut of meat, it wouldn't be that useful.

I'm not advocating for adding even more emojis, I'm advocating for removing the objects emojis entirely because they will never be able to express what a language can unless they become themselves a language. I could also argue that they could have chosen better primitives, especially now that they make many combination emojis, but the goal here isn't to recreate Little Alchemy. We already have a great tool to communicate "objects" in written forms, and that's language. We lacked a great tool to communicate emotions/facial cues through written text, and "emotion" emojis solved that problem.