Google salad emoji ditches egg, possibly for vegans

Google is all about diversity and inclusiveness, the company says, and it has gone to lengths big and small to prove it. Speaking of the latter of the two, the company recently highlighted one of those smaller changes in a tweet: it has updated its salad emoji to remove the egg, making it more inclusive for vegans. As you'd expect, some people are pretty grumpy about this.

The change has appeared in Android P beta 2, according to Google's Jennifer Daniel, who shared a screenshot of the before-and-after salad emoji in a tweet. The tweet isn't just about the emoji, though, instead ultimately being about diversity and vegans.

There's big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority may I direct your attention to the 🥗 emoji— we've removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad. pic.twitter.com/kzHY0A9ZjG

— jennifer daniel (@jenniferdaniel) June 6, 2018

In the grand scheme of things, a salad isn't a big deal. Most people glance at the emoji and then move on, likely not taking the time to notice the individual ingredients it seems to contain. As the Internet tends to do, though, the sudden mention of an omission for a particular reason has resulted in irrational controversy among a small pocket of easily bothered people.

In a slight change of narrative, Daniel later tweeted a clarification that the redesign is intended to "create an image more faithful to unicode's description." That only fueled nitpicking among some who argued that the egg didn't violate unicode's description because it falls into the "other items" category.

At the end of the day, there are a few takeaways from the revelation: Android's salad emoji will soon lack an egg; the egg's absence may or may not be an effort to make vegans feel welcomed; the salad emoji still lacks cucumbers.