Lyft Gives Vegans 50 Percent Discount

On-demand transportation company Lyft will soon be offering a 50-percent discount to those who eschew all animal products. The monumental move came as a result of internal pressure by vegan employees who felt that the San Francisco-based company’s efforts to lower CO2 emissions, though admirable, stopped short of affecting real change. Lyft’s new program points to United Nations’ 2009 proclamation that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the transportation sector combined. The company now incentivizes its clientele to adopt a plant-based diet as an obvious next step for the forward-thinking, hipster-run business. “We have several employees who do not eat animal products,” Lyft CEO Logan Green told VegNews, “and they are a convincing—though admittedly unforgiving—bunch. So when they sat us down and forced us to watch the documentary Cowspiracy, we kind of had no choice, and we realized we had to do something or there would no longer be a planet on which to offer car-share rides.” In order to ensure that the discount is given to actual vegans—as opposed to reducitarians or posers—customers need to prove their plant-based lifestyle by calling 1-800-VEG-LYFT and answering a series of five rapid-fire questions. According to an unnamed source, the questionnaire includes multiple-choice questions involving appropriate uses for nutritional yeast, winning strategies for air-frying tofu, and advanced food label-reading skills. Once pre-approved, customers will be asked to email a photo of their refrigerator contents, along with one letter of reference, to the company’s intern, who wants to be identified simply as “Stacy.” “Once approved,” Stacy explains, “the veganness of the client will be coded on the app interface, and a 50 percent deduction will automatically be made … which, ya know, is pretty rad.” Stacy—who currently identifies as vegan “except for my second-hand leather belt”—also confirmed that Lyft is in the beta-stage of testing an app algorithm that will pair vegan drivers with vegan customers, encouraging a community-wide effort to mainstream discussions of local vegan fast-food options.

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