Rethinking Disability: From Kitchen Tools to Cultural Shifts

Gianna Blasco ’27
blascogis00@lakeforest.edu
JOUR 320 Student

A glimpse through the kitchen window of Betsey Farber’s vacation house in Southern France might have revealed her anguish caused by a vegetable peeler. The mundane task of skinning an apple became impossible due to her arthritis. Her husband, Sam Farber, was frustrated that the design of the vegetable peeler caused her pain, so he decided to design a more inclusive one. And it took off. 

“Nobody makes the old kind anymore,” said Lake Forest College Prof. Janet McCraken during a recent panel discussion [Feb. 19] on disability at Lake Forest College. “Everyone makes this kind, or knockoffs of this kind, because it’s so much better and so much more pleasant to use.” 

It turns out that when we create solutions for those facing the greatest challenges, we often improve life for everyone, panel participants said. Why, where was the panel held – who was on it? how many students attended? 

While the Americans with Disabilities Act has created important policy changes, the panel participants agreed that the deeper cultural shift that is needed is still in progress.

As part of the discussion, Prof. Holly Swyers, who teaches anthropology, explored how disability extends beyond the ADA’s official definition of “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” Instead, it’s a social construct, she says, contesting traditional notions of disability as a binary condition—either you are disabled, or you’re not. 

McCraken expanded on that idea, drawing from Plato’s Phaedo to argue that mortality itself is “a disability shared with all life on Earth.” Despite this universal experience, she said society often struggles to embrace those with visible disabilities. 

“It shouldn’t be hard for anybody to identify or sympathize with anybody with any kind of disability,” McCraken said. “And yet there are a lot of people who are very uncomfortable with other people’s disabilities.”

The root of this discomfort, Swyers argued, lies in capitalism’s stress on utility, and how useful we are. This mindset, she explained, is deeply ingrained through generations of social conditioning that equates human value with productivity. 

“Why are we judging each other by usefulness? Why are none of us just enough?” she asked.

Like the vegetable peeler, when we create solutions for those facing the greatest challenges, we often improve life for everyone, Swyers said. 

That kind of interdependence suggests a different approach to disability, where we can accept and value differences instead of “fixing” them, said Roshni Patel, chair of Social Justice Studies and an assistant professor of philosophy. 

“We have this myth in America that we all exist as really independent creatures, and that’s just not true. I depend on so many people and so many things for my life to be what it is,” said Patel. “Maybe somebody can’t peel vegetables, and that’s fine. Somebody else can do that for them. And that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that.”