United Taste of Ableism (MasterChef 1)

Spoilers for MasterChef season 13 (United Tastes of America)

Talk of the word “handicap”

There are good things in MasterChef but there’s also some awful things.

In season 13, the focus is different regions (the Northeast, the South, the West, and the Midwest) of the United States.

In episode 6 (the 2nd challenge after the regional auditions) they had mystery boxes of apples.

Kyle, who won the previous challenge and got the immunity pin, got to choose if a region made a sweet or a savory apple dish.

He believed a sweet dish would be more difficult and, because of that, he assigned it to the Northeast.

Kyle said he wanted to “handicap them”.

Then, in episode 8, Jennifer had the power to take 10 minutes away from a region because she won the last challenge.

Her exact words were, “It’s already so difficult to prepare an elevated dish in 60 minutes. Taking ten minutes away can absolutely be a huge handicap for someone.”

I have a huge problem with this language.

“Handicap(ped)” is a word many people use to describe disabled people. “Many people” is usually ableist nondisabled people who don’t understand or don’t care about disabled people asking for that word to not be used.

Using that word to refer to disabled people AND mean putting someone at a disadvantage is not okay. It’s incredibly ableist. By doing that you are equating disability/being disabled to being disadvantaged. You equate disability to being worse off than someone who isn’t disabled - and that is simply not true. Someone being disabled - physically or not - does not automatically mean their life is ANY worse than that of a nondisabled person’s.