Surely there is already some international standards body or panel which deals with food safety and labelling? (maybe ISO 22000 Food Safety Management Systems)
If there is a real need for characters to represent food allergens, wouldn't such a body be the right group to come up with appropriate glyphs and then make a proposal to ISO 10646 / Unicode - Chris On 25 July 2015 at 22:13, William_J_G Overington <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > >
