> On Jul 29, 2015, at 7:27 AM, Andrew West <andrewcw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 29 July 2015 at 14:42, William_J_G Overington > <wjgo_10...@btinternet.com> wrote: >> >> For example, one such character could be used to be placed before a list of >> emoji characters for food allergens to indicate that that a list of dietary >> need follows. >> >> For example, >> >> My dietary need is no gluten no dairy no egg >> >> There could be a way to indicate the following. >> >> My diet can include soya > > There already is, you can write "My diet can include soya". > > If you are likely to swell up and die if you eat a peanut (for > example), you will not want to trust your life to an emoji picture of > a peanut which could be mistaken for something else or rendered as a > square box for the recipient. There may be a case to be made for > encoding symbols for food allergens for labelling purposes, but there > is no case for encoding such symbols as a form of symbolic language > for communication of dietary requirements. > > Andrew
I've recently tried to closely follow the care tags on my clothes instead of dumping most of them in the cold/cold batch. When I look at the care tags, I squint at the hieroglyphs[1] for five seconds, give up, and then start looking for instructions written in English — that is, useful instructions. I'd imagine a chef trying to 'read' dietary-needs symbols would be similarly trying, only with dire consequences for getting it wrong. I can see why someone might want to communicate their allergies in a language-agnostic manner while traveling abroad, but for that to work, everyone would need to memorize a bunch of pictographs on the off chance that a foreign traveller is incapable of conveying his or her allergies in a mutually understood spoken/written language. This seems like a worse strategy than carrying around a card that says "I can't have nuts or eggs". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_symbol
