Egg producers accuse Google of 'cracking up' after salad emoji is changed to appease vegans

Egg producers are up in arms after Google designers removed the egg from their salad emoji in order to make it more "inclusive" to vegans.

Google User Experience manager Jennifer Daniel hailed the change on Twitter: "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 salad emoji— we've removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad."

While this move was welcomed by some vegans, members of the egg industry were less than impressed.

The British Egg Industry Council, which represents British egg producers, told The Register: "Are the people at Google cracking up?

"We completely understand that vegans choose not to eat eggs, but in the UK egg sales are up by almost 5 per cent and many people love them, so it seems a shame for the majority to be missing out due to concern for offending one group."

Tim Bonner, Chief Executive at the Countryside Alliance, agreed. He told The Telegraph: "It's utterly ridiculous that a company like Google is bending to the warped ideology of a tiny number of vegan activists. 

"We entirely understand that some people don't want to eat meat or animal problems but getting upset about the fact that other people might want to eat an egg is utter insanity."

Many on Twitter expressed their disappointment: 

After backlash, Ms Daniel clarified: "Just want to clarify that the goal of salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to unicode's description. 'A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumber'" Bon appetite!"

Google has been making an effort to make its emojis more inclusive, and earlier this week announced it would release red-headed emojis this year.

This followed a year-long campaign, where almost 22,000 people signed the petition calling for redhead emojis. Flame-kissed Britons have had to wait five months for ginger emojis to arrive on their mobile devices but it was announced that they will be available from 5th June.

Other new emojis include a bagel, lobster, skateboard and paperclip.