Emoji characters for food allergens
An interesting document entitled
Preliminary proposal to add emoji characters for food allergens
by Hiroyuki Komatsu
was added into the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) Document Register
yesterday.
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15197-emoji-food-allergens.pdf
This is a welcome development.
I suggest that, in view of the importance of precision in conveying information
about food allergens, that the emoji characters for food allergens should be
separate characters from other emoji characters. That is, encoded in a separate
quite distinct block of code points far away in the character map from other
emoji characters, with no dual meanings for any of the characters: a character
for a food allergen should be quite separate and distinct from a character for
any other meaning.
I opine that having two separate meanings for the same character, one meaning
as an everyday jolly good fun meaning in a text message and one meaning as a
specialist food allergen meaning could be a source of confusion. Far better to
encode a separate code block with separate characters right from the start than
risk needless and perhaps medically dangerous confusion in the future.
I suggest that for each allergen that there be two characters.
The glyph for the first character of the pair goes from baseline to ascender.
The glyph for the second character of the pair is a copy of the glyph for the
first character of the pair augmented with a thick red line from lower left
descender to higher right a little above the base line, the thick red line
perhaps being at about thirty degrees from the horizontal. Thus the thick red
line would go over the allergen part of the glyph yet just by clipping it a bit
so that clarity is maintained.
The glyphs are thus for the presence of the allergen and the absence of the
allergen respectively.
It is typical in the United Kingdom to label food packets not only with an
ingredients list but also with a list of allergens in the food and also with a
list of allergens not in the food.
For example, a particular food may contain soya yet not gluten.
Thus I opine that two characters are needed for each allergen.
I have deliberately avoided a total strike through at forty-five degrees as I
opine that that could lead to problems distinguishing clearly the glyph for the
absence of one allergen from the glyph for the absence of another allergen.
I have also wondered whether each glyph for an allergen should include within
its glyph a number, maybe a three-digit number, so that clarity is precise.
I opine that two separate characters for each allergen is desirable rather than
some solution such as having one character for each allergen and a combining
strike through character.
The two separate characters approach keeps the system straightforward to use
with many software packages. The matter of expressing food allergens is far too
important to become entangled in problems for everyday users.
For gluten, it might be necessary to have three distinct code points.
In the United Kingdom there is a legal difference between "gluten-free" and "no
gluten-containing ingredients".
To be labelled gluten-free the product must have been tested. This is to ensure
that there has been no cross-contamination of ingredients. For example, rice
has no gluten, but was a particular load of rice transported in a lorry used
for wheat on other days?
Yet testing is not always possible in a restaurant situation.
William Overington
25 July 2015
