Could the emoji diet be the next food fad?
About four months into their relationship, Rae Steinberg, 23, and Alex McKenzie, 25, decided to shake up the routine a bit — by going “emoji kosher.”
For one month, from April 6 to May 5, they vowed to eat only meals and foods that appear on the iPhone as emojis. They vowed to track their emoji diet with a Snapchat story (a photo of what they were eating juxtaposed with emojis) and separate food journals. They vowed to do it together.
(If nothing in the paragraph above made sense to you, here’s some info on emojis and some info on Snapchat.)
“It really was just something to do,” Steinberg said. “Part of the human experience that people don’t talk about a lot but one of the most important is solidarity – when you find out something weird you have in common with someone.”
As outlined in a Charlotte Storytellers podcast by Chris Sirico on the matter, the couple assessed that there are three ways to define an emoji: by its emojipedia title, by your personal definition of it or by other people’s definitions of it.
The couple has a creative background: Steinberg is a server at Olde Mecklenburg Brewery who was wrapping up an associates degree in arts at CPCC at the time and McKenzie was preparing to move to Knoxville for a transmedia design program at University of Tennessee.
Emojis are not new to their relationship — Steinberg often sends her favorite emoji, the Easter Island head, to McKenzie if he texts her something cute.
One day, she sent McKenzie a bunch of food emojis because she was hungry — and a joint decision to stick to an emoji diet was born. McKenzie said, “I approached it from more like this art project concept, from this absurdist endurance thing.”
The two broke down their approach into two parts. The simple emoji was qualified as pure forms like the banana and the watermelon, while the complex emoji was qualified as a cooked meal, like the cheeseburger or the pizza slice.
They admitted that, at first, the diet was quite bland as they tried to combine simple emojis into meals in the kitchen. But then they started to allow themselves to have more creative liberties. For example, when they wanted to add salt to a dish, they drove four hours to the beach to gather ocean water that they could boil down for sea salt.
Since Steinberg was so busy with work and school, she stuck to a lot of simple emojis:
McKenzie had more time in the kitchen to get creative. Still he saw a pattern of beer and pizza, plus a surge of smoothie ingredients.
McKenzie’s journal started to reveal that onset of creativity, as he and Steinberg began to brainstorm new recipes to entertain their palates. Which they are now using to create a cookbook.
The couple is self-publishing “The Emoji Cookbook” (projected title) through the online platform Blurb, hopefully by the end of 2015. Emoji-kosher enthusiasts can expect more than 15 recipes (like pickled watermelon and a chocolate banana smoothie) in a highly visual format: a recipe photo paired with the story of McKenzie’s experience as well as Steinberg’s, topped off with the recipe itself. (Check in at alex-mckenzie.com for an announcement.)
But don’t expect Oden and Dango – they could never find those ingredients.
The point of using the cookbook? It’s definitely not to lose weight. Although Steinberg lost two pounds and McKenzie lost 10. (Steinberg pointed out that he was also riding his bike a lot that month because the weather was nice.)
Really, though, the point is to collaborate, to be creative, to have a project to follow through to completion.
“We so limit the idea of projects or collaborative experiences to school or work and people don’t really take that into relationships,” Steinberg said. “It can also be a lot of fun.”
Photos: Katie Toussaint, Rae Steinberg, Alex McKenzie
This story was originally published October 27, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Could the emoji diet be the next food fad?."