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Tacos, dumplings, bagels: the complicated politics of food emoji
Like all emoji, the bagel emoji is a tiny cartoon representation of its namesake, which is, again, a bagel. It is round like a bagel and brown like a bagel. It appears to be a plain bagel, which is not the best kind of bagel but also not the worst. It is a blank slate of a bagel —arguably, the bagel-iest kind of bagel, if not the most visually interesting. It is depicted sliced in half, and dry. Is this a good way to eat a bagel? No. Still, the image is very successful at doing its job, which is to communicate the concept of "bagel."
Bagel enthusiasts, though, were very upset. "Take a look at this clearly machine-cut monstrosity with its stiff and bready interior, which couldn't possibly be redeemed by a few minutes in a toaster," lamented Nikita Richardson at Grub Street. (Redemption is the only reason a bagel should ever be toasted, according to true bagel originalists; to toast a fresh bagel is a symptom of what former New York Times food critic and current culinary curmudgeon Mimi Sheraton calls a "decline in the craft of bagel making.")
[...] Part of the bagelmoji ire, explains Heather Schwedel at Slate, is a performance of discerning taste. "People want to demonstrate that they, unlike those emoji rubes, know from good bagels," she writes, noting that with much of the outcry coming from New York, "there may be some geographic snobbery going on too." A good way to prove you are a true New Yorker is to be extremely opinionated about bagels, whether real or pixelated.
[...] But as Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and creator of World Emoji Day, told CNN, people want to see themselves in their tiny icons. "Some of the most vocal requests for new emojis are about representation," he said. The dumpling, the taco, and the pan of paella, for example, all had extremely popular backing. Linguists may not consider emoji a language, Jennifer 8. Lee, the driving force behind the dumpling emoji, told the Atlantic, but "for people who use them, it's almost like fighting for a word that [shows] you exist. When you come up with a word to describe your population, it's a very powerful thing."
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @03:47AM (6 children)
So when do we get an emoji for the people who don't care about emojis?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Kell on Saturday October 06 2018, @06:14AM
I believe you'll find a dedicated key for it, at the bottom centre of the keyboard.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday October 06 2018, @04:27PM (1 child)
You seem like the perfect person for me to share my objection to the pizza emoji with. I don't like pepperoni on a pizza. Every damned pizza emoji has pepperoni on it. Or dwarf tomatoes. But I think it's intended to be pepperoni.
Not only is this offensive to vegetarians, it's presumptuous as hell. A proper non-offensive pizza emoji should contain crust, sauce, and cheese, lightly browned.
In addition, at a minimum, there should be variants for the lactose-intolerant (no cheese), the gluten-intolerant (oat crust), and those sensitive to tomatoes (a nice generic white sauce.)
Won't you join me in my quest to get the pizza emoji problems fixed?
Just dial 1-900-NOP-RONI
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 06 2018, @05:46PM
Can't sites just use web fonts that replace individual glyphs with whatever they want (so that they can change the representation of just one single emoji)? This is possible, right?
If not, we need a CSS5.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @04:28PM
Why can't we just invent some kind of technology for including images within a stream of text? Maybe something like an HTML tag. We could call it <image/>, and it could take attributes like say a url to load the image from or encoded image data. The embedded data would likely need to signify how it was encoded. So here's what i'm thinking of. This is just a first draft:
<image url="https://some.website.com/emoji-library/image.png" />
or
<image embedded-data="image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADIA…" />
If only we already had something like that!
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday October 06 2018, @04:34PM
Right here:
💩
A pile of poo. [emojibase.com]
Leave it everywhere... Computers not required.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @10:23AM
how bout https://finland.fi/emoji/kalsarikannit/ [finland.fi]