How To Be Creative With The Latest Batch Of Food Emojis

The Unicode Consortium probably has a greater impact on the way people communicate in 2018 than almost any other group, but we just know them as Those People Who Make Emojis. The group has unveiled another batch of upcoming emojis that will be added to the Unicode lexicon later this year, and of course our eyes went straight for the new food ones: mango, bagel, cupcake, salt, leafy greens, mooncake, salt.

Hah, good work trying to trick us into more salads with your leafy greens emoji, Unicode! Leafy greens + 🔥🔥🔥 just does not have the same effects as: Friday night 🍕 🔥?

Alright, leafy greens aside because seriously no one texts about chard, let's move on to bagels, cupcake, mooncake, and salt. These are all genius because—much like the (wink wink) eggplant emoji—they can be deployed in nonstandard ways.

For example, salt will absolutely become my go-to emoji for expressing disapproval at someone's "salty" attitude, while the cupcake could be used to mean cupcake as a term of endearment: Miss you, [cupcake emoji]. I personally would also use it as a modifier for overly saccharine/twee stuff, but I'm clearly not a huge cupcake fan. Mango seems like it could be used in a suggestive way, a la the peach emoji, but we will leave that to your imagination.

The bagel emoji frankly looks like the saddest of cardboard bagels, and is a personal attack on the deliciousness of East Coast bagels. But—silver lining—its resemblance to a flying saucer means it could potentially be used in conjunction with 👽 to indicate a UFO sighting.

What to do with mooncake, though? This emoji probably won't see much use among non-Chinese people (and even Chinese bakeries typically serve it as a lunar holiday treat, so how necessary is it, really?) unless we get creative. It kind of looks like a steak-and-ale pot pie to me, so I guess you could use it to sext your Tinder match about a pot-pie date?

That we have a mooncake emoji before we have a waffle or potato chip emoji is astounding and merits immediate rectification from the Unicode team. In the meantime, we're immediately alerting The Salty Waitress to the saltshaker's addition.