Re: Vegan and gluten-avoiding vegan emojis (was: Re: Announcing The Unicode® Standard, Version 8.0)

[Marcel Schneider]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015, William_J_GOverington  wrote:

> I too am a vegan, in fact a gluten-avoiding vegan.
> 
> Could there be emoji to signal those two diets in descriptions of food please?

I replied:
> This would be very important, to get more people take the move. Today where everything is emoji-powered, Unicode should encode the sooner the better, some striking emojis carrying the message of veganism.
> 
> Because today, AFAIK, there are only food-labels as the wavy-barred circled ear of wheat for gluten-free food, or something like a barred glass of milk for dairy-free food. There will be to fix a flaw on designations too, because dairy-free liquids and bifidus-fermented products may be referred to as for example soya-based dairy. 
> 
> The extremely precise non-vegan food-emojis that actually exist, need to be counter-balanced by an even greater variety of vegan emojis.

To greet Mr Overingtonʼs idea I replied on the spot, but a closer review of the U+1F300 – U+1F5FF block reveals to me that the already huge number of vegan food emojis (overweighing today in a 2:1 ratio) could have triggered the demand for meat&cheese emojis. This could be the beginning of an emoji battle between vegan and non-vegan.

For the vegan lifestyle on the whole, I think now about encoding some of the many already existing vegan food labels. For the gluten-avoiding vegan diet, the question could then be how to combine both this one and one of the circled and (swung-dash-)barred ears of wheat used in labelling. Perhaps this could be added above right. However, to promote diets and lifestyle, one would probably better prefer the circled GF logo because negation is perhaps not the best idea, it brings a connotation of starvation, while in truth, paradoxically, starvation is the counter-part of meat production when looking at the local populations expropriated of their farms by multinational companies or poisoned by pesticides in the neighborhood where food for our cattle is produced, as well as the end-point of meat&cheese&egg&company because of the serious disease, performance-breakdown, illness and finally prematured death they bring to people who eat them.

Marcel Schneider
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