Uber Eats Super Bowl ad backfires with peanut allergy joke

In the ad, Jennifer Aniston forgot about her whirlwind romance on “Friends” with David Schwimmer. Rapper Jelly Roll forgot his face is tattooed. Usher forgot he just performed in the Super Bowl half-time show. 

Meanwhile, Uber Eats forgot that making fun of people with allergies isn’t funny. 

A few days before the big game, Uber Eats released the original version of its Super Bowl ad on February 6. In one scene, a man holding a spoonful of peanut butter recalls, as his left eye swells closed, that its main ingredient is peanuts. The moment sparked outrage from food advocacy groups, which decried its insensitivity to more than 33 million Americans who suffer from life-threatening food allergies. 

The very next day, on February 7, Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE), the country’s leading non-profit for food allergy advocacy and research, posted a statement that expressed surprise and disappointment that “Uber Eats would use the disease of life-threatening food allergy as humor,” and that the condition is “a disease, not a diet. Enough is enough.”

FARE estimates that about one in 10 adults in the U.S. have food allergies, compared to one in 13 children. But the numbers are rising: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the prevalence of food allergies in children increased by 50% between 1997 and 2011. One study found the prevalence of peanut allergies has increased 3.5-fold over the past two decades. 

The allergy has proved fatal recently, too. Órla Baxendale, a professional dancer based in New York City, died last month after suffering an allergic reaction from mislabeled cookies she bought from the supermarket chain Stew Leonard’s. The cookies have since been recalled due to undeclared eggs and…