The viral appeal of the aubergine

It seems at first an unlikely ingredient for global domination – particularly if, like me, you first encountered it as an unappetising squidge at the centre of a badly-made seventies moussaka.

While the actual aubergine – the palpable purple signature ingredient from said retro Greek bake – remains a relatively minor player in the western larder at least, its visual representation, the aubergine in emoji form, has broken out of the virtual veg box.

The text symbol for aubergine since it was first created, in Japan, in only 2010, has been visually depicted more times than any other fruit in the history of the world to date, maybe even more than all the others combined (For pedants, like the tomato, the aubergine is technically a fruit rather than the vegetable it’s culinarily generally treated as).

The numbers are staggering, so high they are impossible to count with any accuracy: some five billion emojis are used on Facebook alone every day, with that count ever rising, and the aubergine is at the upper end of the most popular.

With a global annual harvest around 50 million tonnes (it’s big in China and India) – and allowing for, say, an average weight of 500g per individual aubergine, you’re looking at maybe 300 million aubergines eaten worldwide a day.