Top 50 Jack Monroe Quotes

We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.

But it’s a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of ‘social security’.

When I was at my lowest point I had a lot of help from charities, food banks, to see me through so it is nice to start to give something back.

When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can’t be rented out as a dwelling.

I’m not organised, and I don’t cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I’m chaotic. Always have been.

You can pretty much make anything with a base of tinned tomatoes. If I don’t have tinned tomatoes in my cupboard, I start to panic – it’s a genuine thing.

I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.

Tins with ringpulls tend to belong to those with slightly more disposable income; look at the Basics and Value ranges next time you are in the supermarket and you will see that they require a tin opener to get into them.

Many families teeter on the edges, not qualifying for the little support on offer, unwilling to seek it for fear of drawing attention to a household barely holding the pieces together, or hit by unexpected bills.

If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn’t really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it’s fresh because it’s just being used in a lot of other things.

As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since.

I have been cooking vegan recipes for a long time, long before the release of my first cookbook, because in the rubbish old days of scraping by on mismanaged, delayed and suspended benefits, meat and dairy products were often just too expensive, in contrast to their kinder counterparts.

Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.

If the thought of cold tomato soup makes you shudder, take it from a veteran, it’s like a creamy gazpacho, but in a decent society, nobody should have to find out.

Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.

I remember loving food tech because of the precision and the creativity, the weights and measures, the tiny glimpses of flavour.

Because I’m in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.

I can be wildly enthusiastic and want to try to do everything that I feel would be useful and educational and beneficial – but I’ve crashed and burned a few times.

I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn’t fun any more.

It’s definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.

There’s all kinds of research that shows children operate best if they start the day with some proper food inside them – it’s a no-brainer.

Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.

If I’ve learned anything in the last seven or eight years it’s that my career flies by the seat of my pants and that every time I’m booked for something, I’m ill, and anything – like a TV opportunity – I treat as my last ever one because it’s maybe my swansong.

Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens – I wasn’t intimidated by it.

I put my son’s nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.

I want to empower people who might have lost their way in the kitchen or never known their way around it in the first place. And just go, this is a thing you can do, you can do this, and if you want I can show you how.

I’m not the spring chicken everyone wants. I’ve got a debilitating illness. The brave face is ‘I’m busy with work’ but I’ve sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That’s why I’m single. I’ve resigned myself to being a difficult woman.

The thing with my recipes is, I don’t have hours to faff about in the kitchen. My recipes are all 15, 20 minute, chop it up and stick it in the oven.

And I’m autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I’m very lucky to have found cooking because it’s the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for ‘gifted and talented’ children.

Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.

I’m well-known for saying unsayable things.

Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.

I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can’t really justify spending a fortune on food.

I’m not going to have any more children. I’m quite confident about that.

I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.

Don’t say things about people that aren’t true… because there are consequences for that.

In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.

I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was… the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you’ve got a fantastic dinner on the table.

My parents tended to cook big batch food because there was always the possibility that other children would turn up with their carrier bag and shoes and we had to gently bring them out of their shells.

My politics are food-related – food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts – and my food is political.

A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.

I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I’m not a vegan. I am a vague-one.

I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.

I’ve had success, but I’m still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you’ve lived it it never leaves you.

Until people realise benefits doesn’t mean scrounger, and austerity isn’t a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there’s still a lot of work to do.

Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.

I was a bit of an accident really – I certainly didn’t set out to write a cookbook or three. I didn’t have a plan. I was unemployed, writing a blog about local politics and a few recipes, and it was more successful than I could ever have imagined it to be.

Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.

Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.