How vegans made egg vanish from salad emoji
IT’S a decision that may leave you wondering if Google is cracking up. The internet giant has removed the egg from its salad emoji – in case it offends vegans.
Bosses redesigned the image so that it only included lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes in order to make it more ‘inclusive’. The original emoji, for use in mobile phone messages, included a boiled egg cut in half to show its golden yolk.
Announcing the move, Jennifer Daniel, Google’s ‘user experience manager’, wrote on Twitter: ‘There’s big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google making this [a] priority may I direct your attention to the salad emoji – we’ve removed the egg ... making this a more inclusive vegan salad.’
But the redesign provoked an angry backlash from egg producers and farmers, who said it was ‘utterly ridiculous’.
The British egg Industry Council said: ‘Are the people at Google cracking up? We completely understand that vegans choose not to eat eggs, but in the UK egg sales are up by almost 5 per cent and many people love them, so it seems a shame for the majority to be missing out due to concern for offending one group.’
Tim Bonner, chief executive at the Countryside Alliance, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘It’s utterly ridiculous that a company like Google is bending to the warped ideology of a tiny number of vegan activists.’
emoji fans were also unimpressed, with one writing on Twitter: ‘You just EXCLUDED the vast majority of people on this planet ... those that aren’t vegan.’
Miss Daniel later claimed the redesign was in order to be to ‘faithful’ to the healthy salad description.