Vegans, despite doing their bit to help save the world, are always getting a bad rep in mainstream culture and popular media.
You can understand, then, why some of them might be a bit quick to defend their lifestyle choices, especially when they’re berated for a laugh during the Super Bowl.
Enter Hyundai, who pissed off PETA when they released this advert, titled The Elevator:
Starring Jason Bateman, The Elevator concept is simple: It presents a bunch of people in an elevator – or lift as the contraption is otherwise known in the UK – skipping past a load of unpleasant experiences.
We see the riders screech past jury duty, a root canal and the nauseating prospect of shopping for a car.
One undesirable experience is a ‘vegan dinner party’ complete with ‘beetloaf’.
Turns out, PETA had beef with the car company for their suggestion cruelty-free dinner parties are no fun, and they took to Twitter to say:
ICYMI: The trend of 2019 is taking the elevator UP to vegan dinner parties (and an Earth, heart, & animal-friendly lifestyle).
Instead of buying a car from people with outdated ideas, we suggest a vegan Smartcar by Mercedes. Great mileage & acceleration, turns on a dime.
While I’m sure many vegans have bigger fish to fry than a silly joke by a car company – like the impending sixth mass extinction or fishless oceans or fox hunts or puppy farms or global warming caused my meat production – there are a few people who’ve opted to take Hyundai to task for the advert.
One Twitter user, going by the handle @__likethemovie proved a point well when they showed Hyundai what they would be eating as part of their vegan Super Bowl spread.
They wrote:
Hey @Hyundai this is actually what a vegan dinner party looks like… This is our super bowl spread!
Others called it a ‘cheap joke’, said they wouldn’t be inviting Hyundai employees to any of their vegan dinner parties in future and said they’d never buy Hyundai cars again because the company was ‘perpetuating the myth vegan food is bad’.
You can read some of the reactions from Twitter below:
A Hyundai representative said in a statement to Business Insider:
We totally respect veganism and are happy that it is mainstream.
We also hope that vegans have a sense of humour just like dentists, parents, judges and flight attendants [and] the other stops represented on the elevator.
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A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.