Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Zuma Juice: Drink Our Product or Be Fat and Disabled

I'm on vacation this week, but felt the need to post about this:

I was alerted by a twitter friend to an ad from a juicing company that shows two slender women making some kind of juice. The woman on the left is using a blender and, ew! On the right, slender woman number two uses this Zuma thing to make juice more easily!

And then a woman in a wheelchair, not slender, with a huge vat of cheese puffs and a giant mug of soda, rolls up. They begin fighting over the Zuma juice. The ad sets the fat disabled junk food eater against the thin Zuma-drinking women. It's meant to be comic. It's wholly unacceptable.

UPDATE: Here's the story, as I now understand it: Zuma Juice, by their own statements, wanted to compare the health conscious people who juice with a caricature of a health unconscious lazy slob - so they gave her junk food, soda, a big vat of cheese puffs, and a power wheelchair. In their "apologies," they indicate that they would have used a hover board if they had them, but that since many power wheelchair users don't even need them (just being lazy, in their minds).

The idea that disabled people are lazy and self-damaging is widely prevalent, linked to all kinds of stigma, from social shaming, police violence, and attacks on Social Security.

Zuma Juice rarely tweets.  You can contact them here.

 Update with tweets (thanks to Karrie Higgins for pointing these out): More context with screenshots from various interactions with them.


Images captioned here.
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