Jack Monroe Quotes

Jack Monroe

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 17, 1988

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.

Jack Monroe

Poverty took me from being the girl who was always the lead in the school play, to a woman who can't open her own front door.

Jack Monroe

I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.

Jack Monroe

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.

Jack Monroe

I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties.

Jack Monroe

Yet there is clearly something about bold, neurodivergent women and girls that prompts powerful men to scrape the sides of their own putrid barrels of opinion to attack this 'terrifying' otherness.

Jack Monroe

It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.

Jack Monroe

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.

Jack Monroe

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.

Jack Monroe

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

Jack Monroe

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.

Jack Monroe

Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.

Jack Monroe

I tend to tell my readers to go for the cheapest ingredients every time, unless they're unbearable. If so, you only need to have them once and the next week switch up.

Jack Monroe

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

Jack Monroe

I write cheap recipes for struggling families and single people, and have donated 800 copies of my newest cookery book to food banks and other good causes.

Jack Monroe

Talk to families in poverty and ask them what they need, instead of prescribing it for them. Ask what the barriers are. Ask what would help. And then deliver it.

Jack Monroe

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.

Jack Monroe

Austerity is, devastatingly, not a party political issue.

Jack Monroe

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

Jack Monroe

Benefit sanctions have been applied in cases where a person has failed to turn up to the jobcentre because they are in hospital following a heart attack. A woman was sanctioned for attending cancer treatment. A man was sanctioned for attending a funeral.

Jack Monroe