Google Removes Hard-Boiled Egg from Salad Emoji to Make It 'More Inclusive' for Vegans

Android users who follow a plant-based diet and are heavily reliant on wordless communication have reason to rejoice.

Android users who follow a strict vegan diet and are heavily reliant on wordless communication have reason to rejoice.

On Wednesday, Jennifer Daniel, a manager on Google’s design team, announced on Twitter that there would be an evident change in its salad emoji. In side-by-side photos, the original shows a bowl of lettuce with two tomato slices and half of a hard-boiled egg, and the new version shows…just the lettuce and tomatoes.

“There’s big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google,” she wrote, noting that they have “removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad.”

After the inevitable backlash from many Twitter users, Daniel later clarified that “the goal of salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to unicode’s description,” which is: “A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumber.” (It should again be noted that there are no “other salad items” apparent in the new emoji, not even such as cucumber.)

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This is not the first time that Google has made a major change to one of its food emojis. In November, they switched the placement of the slice of cheese in their cheeseburger emoji after public outcry over the incorrect order of operations (cheese goes on top of the patty, not under it.)