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Sushi, pizza, and birthday cake? The emoji diet sounds delicious

Could you survive a week of only emoji food and drinks? One journalist takes the challenge and ends up missing her breakfast bagels.

Bonnie Burton
Journalist Bonnie Burton writes about movies, TV shows, comics, science and robots. She is the author of the books Live or Die: Survival Hacks, Wizarding World: Movie Magic Amazing Artifacts, The Star Wars Craft Book, Girls Against Girls, Draw Star Wars, Planets in Peril and more! E-mail Bonnie.
Bonnie Burton
2 min read

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Food emoji includes all four food groups plus candy! Screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET

Food emojis come in handy whenever we want to text someone a pixilated birthday cake or notify our Twitter followers that we are hankering for a slice of pizza. So, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make an emoji diet.

Kelsey Rexroat, a journalist from The Atlantic, decided to see if she could survive on a diet based on the almost 60 foods represented in emoji format.

For a week, Rexroat only ate food items represented as emoji -- which include various fruit, vegetables, meats, sushi, pasta, rice, breakfast food, desserts, soups, and snacks. As part of the challenge, she also had to eat every food represented by the emoji by the end of the week. Also included were emoji for drinks like milk, coffee, tea, and of course mixed drink cocktails, wine, and beer.

Sadly, tacos, hot dogs, pancakes, bagels, cheese, and deli sandwiches are not represented as emojis. Rexroat also wasn't allowed to substitute animal emojis for food. So no pig emoji representing bacon! But she could make smoothies combining the fruit and milk emojis.

"The emoji diet has had me eating more seafood and fresh fruit, which I welcome as healthy additions," Rexroat wrote in The Atlantic. "This diet is essentially the opposite of Atkins. Of the 59 food emoji, eight incorporate rice, and 11 are desserts. One manages to be both -- the colored balls on a stick are dango, sweet dumplings made from rice flour and often filled with red bean paste."

Towards the last day of the diet, even though she wasn't left hungry or dissatisfied, Rexroat had plenty of recommendations for new food emoji from her "typical cooking staples like garlic, onion, and spinach to snacks like chips, cheese, and popcorn."