Why Do Bananas and Pizza Get to Be Emoji When So Many Other Foods Don't?

Who decides, and how did food emoji end up the way they are?

In August 2014, Kelsey Rexroat, a writer for The Atlantic, took on a challenge: for one week she would eat only foods that existed as emoji.

Rexroat quickly found she could not keep to her usual diet, because emoji were missing a lot of ordinary food: cheese, sandwiches, yogurt, cereal, avocado, burritos, salad, soup, hot dogs and more. Try describing your own meals in emoji and the list of missing foods keeps growing.

Two and a half years on, though, our phones have 20 more food emoji. If Rexroat ran the experiment today, she would have a little more to eat.

Even so, of the roughly 2,000 emoji that exist, only 82 are food and drink. Given how much of life is spent eating, that is not a high share.

And when you are hunting through those 82 for the one you want, an obvious question comes up: why did this food become an emoji when that one didn't?

1.

Because emoji were born in Japan, there are far more of them for Japanese food than for the food of any other country: 🍘🍡🍢🍙🍣🍥🍶🍱🍜.

At the end of the last century, Microsoft had just released Windows 95 and pagers were spreading through Japan. Email caught on fast as the new replacement for letters. It also brought a complaint you still hear today: many people felt the new medium got in the way of understanding each other, because neither side could read the other's mood from tone of voice.

Shigetaka Kurita, then working at the telecom company Docomo, saw that people needed a way to show feeling in digital messages, and with his team drew 176 characters of 12×12 pixels each — the first emoji. Kurita's team took much of its inspiration from Japanese comics and kanji, so those early emoji look rather different from today's.

Young Japanese women took to the cute little characters at once, and they began to spread. Docomo never patented emoji, so its rivals designed their own, and emoji went mainstream as standard equipment on Japanese phones.

Which is why, when Apple began selling the iPhone in Japan in 2008, it suddenly noticed a problem: it had no emoji. The gap really did put Japanese buyers off, and Masayoshi Son, president of Apple's retail partner SoftBank, called an emergency press conference about it, saying he had "convinced Apple that in Japan, an email without emoji doesn't count as an email."

Apple quickly shipped an iOS 2.2 update for Japanese iPhones that put emoji into the system — which is why you see so many Japanese foods among emoji today.

Once emoji entered Unicode and went global, though, the Japanese lost interest. As Kurita put it: "Most Japanese people just don't think Apple's emoji are kawaii [cute], on a basic design level."

Japanese users drifted to kaomoji — emoticons made of text — and to the stickers built into chat apps, while the Japanese food emoji designed for them ended up being used mostly by everyone else.

2.

Like every other emoji, food emoji are not conjured out of nothing by the Unicode Consortium, the body that approves them. Anyone can send the Consortium a proposal for a new emoji.

Some people call the Consortium's members "shadowy overlords," but you can find all sorts of information about them on its website without much trouble. According to Mark Davis, co-founder and current president, around the late 1980s they realized that manufacturers in different countries had each built their own encoding system — the same letter carried a different code in each — which meant computers in different places simply could not talk to each other.

To fix that, the Unicode Consortium was born at Xerox and Apple. It went on to create a standard encoding for text characters, giving every character judged useful — letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and now emoji — a specific number that computers can recognize. Whatever device you use and wherever you are, the system then reads what you typed as the same character.

Today the Consortium's members are mostly tech companies such as Adobe, Apple, Google and Facebook, but in fact any company, organization or individual willing to pay the dues can join. Rights vary with the fee: full membership, which brings access to all relevant information and a vote at every meeting, costs US$18,000 a year. Sign up for the long term and you get a discount.

Members meet once a quarter to review the proposals that have come in and decide which emoji to add to Unicode.

After each Unicode update, vendors such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter decide for themselves which emoji to offer and what shape and color to give them. But the Consortium's design guidelines say that while the shape of a character may vary noticeably, vendors' designers should keep the same "core" form, based on the commonest version — which is why an emoji can look different depending on where you see it and still be easy to read.

Writing an emoji proposal is not simple. At a minimum it has to do three things: give reasons for choosing that emoji, supply an image of it, and suggest where it belongs in the ordering.

Emoji images look simple, but designing a good food emoji from scratch is not. The design firm The Iconfactory has drawn many emoji for Twitter and Facebook, and its founder, Gedeon Maheux, says that a food emoji has to be legible with no words to explain it — is that a chestnut or an acorn? — and the food also has to look both appetizing and representative.

Jennifer 8. Lee, who once filed a proposal for a dumpling emoji, put it this way: "You need designers, you need linguists, you need people with a broader range of backgrounds."

The idea came to Lee while she was chatting with her friend Yiying Lu, who had noticed there was no dumpling on her phone. As it happened, Lu was a designer; she drew a dumpling emoji on the spot and sent it to Lee.

Someone notices, for one reason or another, that a food is missing from emoji — sends the Unicode Consortium a proposal — and it passes. That is where many of the food emoji on our phones come from.

The Google engineer Hiroyuki Komatsu fits the pattern. Hoping to let people with food allergies name their allergens quickly, he filed a proposal in November 2015 for egg, milk, peanut, kiwi, pancake, shrimp and squid emoji. Several of them are already in Unicode 9.0, released in 2016.

Lee had the same kind of idea, but she took it much further: "At first, it was just a one-off complaint. But then — 'Wait, if there's no dumpling emoji, then whatever system is running here has already failed. I thought, something is wrong with the world, and I'm going to fix it.'"

Lee then gave the Unicode Consortium $75 for a membership, which let her sit in on a meeting where emoji proposals were reviewed. There she found that most of the decision-makers were white male engineers. "They're focused on coding. This kind of review process is definitely not the ideal way to promote a vibrant visual language for the whole world."

So alongside her proposals for the dumpling and the takeout-box emoji, Lee founded an organization called Emojination to push for a better review process.

She then launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $3,750, enough to cover a non-voting Unicode membership at $2,500 a year and keep watch over how emoji are reviewed. People liked an organization whose slogan was "Emoji by the people, for the people," and the target was met in 50 hours.

The dumpling and the takeout box may be only the beginning. In an interview with NPR, Lee said that a salad emoji already exists but not every Asian eats salad: "I think it's important to get lettuce and leafy greens [emoji] through, because we don't eat enough vegetables."

3.

You have probably seen countless emoji-themed marketing campaigns, but only one company-led food emoji proposal has ever succeeded: Taco Bell's.

Consortium rules bar logos, brands, UI icons, signatures and specific people or deities from becoming emoji — which means you will never find fries with an "M" on them, or a cola can with a red-and-blue label, on your emoji keyboard.

For Taco Bell, whose flagship product is the taco itself, the brand name did not need to appear. With Mexican food growing more popular, pushing for a taco emoji was ideal marketing; it was, in fact, the company's first global campaign.

In January 2015 Taco Bell filed a petition on change.org and collected 25,000 signatures in three months. That June the taco emoji was approved, and Taco Bell said: "We'd like to think our little change.org petition had something to do with it."

On its page explaining how to submit an emoji, though, the Unicode Consortium singled the taco petition out: "Commercial petitions for 🌮 TACO played no role in the selection, since they carry no evidentiary weight."

Either way, Taco Bell staged a celebration to squeeze more marketing out of it. Working with the creative agencies Deutsch and Fox ADHD, it built the Taco Emoji Engine: tweet "@TACOBELL 🌮 + [any emoji]" and Taco Bell would reply automatically with a GIF fusing the two.

4.

Food emoji began with a single hot drink. They are used so widely now that it is hard to say which is the most popular overall — but on Twitter 🍕 leads, and as of this moment it has been used 23.17 million times.

These 82 food emoji are nowhere near enough.

Follow the food emoji added over the years and you will see they track current food fashions fairly closely. That is no mystery, because when the Unicode Consortium screens proposals it weighs two things heavily: compatibility, meaning whether the emoji is already popular on platforms outside Unicode; and expected usage, meaning whether people would actually use it often once it existed. Applicants usually cite data from Google Trends and the like to show how badly an emoji is needed.

Take the avocado. When New York Magazine proposed an avocado emoji in 2014, its stated reason was that avocado stands for 50 percent of recipes. Americans had little interest in avocados thirty years ago, but by 2012 they were eating 5 pounds each a year (about 2.27 kilograms), and avocados turned up on nearly every food blog.

In 2016 the avocado went into Unicode 9.0 along with green salad — the most natural thing in the world at a moment when healthy and organic food is everywhere.

A report published last year by Emogi, a startup that builds emoji-related products, found that 75 percent of American consumers want more emoji to choose from. Emogi's chief strategy officer, Alexis Berger, said: "People want better options in every category, food included — not just one coffee emoji but specific drinks, not just food emoji but specific restaurants and dishes."

The Unicode Consortium seems to feel it too: at its fourth-quarter meeting last year it approved 57 candidate emoji, 13 of them food. They are not yet formally part of Unicode 10, but candidates are usually approved in the end. By comparison, Unicode 7 in 2014 and Unicode 8 in 2015 added just 2 and 6 food emoji.

If people stay this eager to speak in emoji, we may soon see recipes written entirely in them — not a few dishes cobbled together from a short list of ingredients, but whatever recipe the cook wants to write.

Now that emoji are everywhere, one claim comes up again and again: limited as they are, emoji have become a new language, or are becoming one. Mark Davis disagrees, though he allows that it is "not unimaginable."

Kurita made emoji to help people understand each other, but the meaning of many emoji has wandered far from what the people who proposed them had in mind. BuzzFeed once published a Complete Dictionary of Dirty Emojis, and a fair number of the entries are food.

Which means that when you describe your dinner in emoji, whoever reads it may have no idea what you ate.

Cover image: NPR, cloudfront

Graphics: Wu Lingwei