Ensuring that we can all keep using the word “adult” as a verb without ever venturing into the terrifying territory of “mature,” the high-end grocery experts at Whole Foods have made it possible to snag their hottest recipes using nothing but emoji. Patrons of the organic guilt wonderland can send a Facebook message to a bot set up by the company, which will happily pump out recipes to tell you which brand of $8 pepper or whatever you’ll need to get them made.
And while you could use plain old, non-colorful words for this task, the Whole Foods bot (which you can find by searching for “Whole Foods” in Facebook Messenger) will also accept little pictures of whatever thing it is that you want to shove in your face. Sending a hamburger emoji gets you back a series of recipes for perfect burgers, for instance, while pudding nets a blueprint for coconut flan. (Sending the eggplant emoji, meanwhile, gets back a recipe for eggplant fritters, and the weird, shameful feeling of having sexually harassed a robot.) According to Venture Beat, the company’s goal is to make “recipe discovery easy, and to help our customers find new ways to experience the foods they love,” even, presumably, if they’ve been rendered so numb by quinoa withdrawal that they no longer have the capacity to speak.