The radical of 餌 is either 飠or 𩙿: the former looks like a squished taberu (食) whereas the latter has a 二 shape at the bottom instead of ム as well as a straight 一 under the hat instead of a drop.
While there are two code points for the different radicals, there is only one code point for 餌. Which radical is being displayed depends on the font one’s using.
My Japanese font, [jisho](https://jisho.org/search/%E9%A4%8C%20%23kanji), [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A4%8C#Japanese) and [Kanjipedia](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/kanji/%e9%a4%8c/) all display it with a 二. [jpdb](https://jpdb.io/kanji/餌) and [WWWJDIC](https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1MKU990C), however, render it with a ム. [Glyphwiki](http://en.glyphwiki.org/wiki/u990c) primarily displays it with a 二 but contains the ム form (among others) as a variant.
Wanting to investigate these two forms further, I naturally turned to Wiktionary which usually documents such regional glyph variations well (see e.g. [酋](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%85%8B#Translingual)). Unfortunately, [it didn’t say anything about the regional variants of 餌](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A4%8C#Translingual).
In the [koohii stories](https://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/%E9%A4%8C), two people made the following relevant claims:
Hoticehunter wrote: “With the 2010 Joyo update, the character now uses the 食 (#1582) kanji on the left instead of… whatever this is now.”
upbound wrote: “Note: This kanji’s stroke order and shape has changed as of 2020, the third stroke of of 食(eat) looks more like a 一(one) and the last 2 strokes have been replaced with 二(two). Story: Feed is mainly thought of as food for two-eared animals.”
I tried to verify these claims but the only thing I found was a [Wikipedia footnote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji#cite_note-G-8): “The 5 kanji 餌・遡・遜・謎・餅 use one of the radicals 辶 / 𩙿. As stated on the first page of the official Jōyō Kanji list, although the officially correct form of those characters uses the forms 辶 / 𩙿, it is permissible to use instead the forms 辶 / 飠, which are indicated in square brackets in the official list.”
At least this tells us that 餌 with the 二 shape is the “official” variant (which is sad because it is inconsistent with 飯 etc.). But what about the 2010 to 2020 claim? Is it true that the ム variant used to be the officially prescribed standard form for 10 years? If so, why did they go back to the more inconsistent form?
1 comment
Just to clarify, 餌 appears to be made of
食 for the semantic component
耳 for the phonetic component
And classified with 食 as the dictionary radical
Are you asking about why the 食 looks like 飠or 𩙿sometimes depending on the font?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/飠
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/𩙿
Japanese has used different forms for components throughout history, Unicode is great, but it has its limitations in changing how it was implemented. It would arguably be a technological limitation at this point.