Jack Monroe

For other people named Jack Monroe, see Jack Monroe (disambiguation).

Jack Monroe
File:Jack Monroe.jpg Jack Monroe in 2013
Born	1988 (age 35–36) Southend-on-Sea
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Writer, journalist and campaigner
Years active	2012–present
Partner	Allegra McEvedy
Children	1
Website	www.agirlcalledjack.com

Jack Monroe (born 1988) is an English writer, journalist and campaigner on poverty issues, particularly food and hunger relief.

Journalism

Jack Monroe gained a profile in the British press for her recipes for ultra-affordable meals, which she created after she left work and was forced to find cheap ways to feed herself and her son. Monroe says that she could not negotiate flexible working and so caring for her son, Johnny and working at her previous job became impractical.

Jack Monroe started blogging at A Girl Called Jack, sharing the cheap recipes she made for herself and her son. She aimed to provide pleasant, satisfying meals for the two of them costing no more than £10 per week. The blog with Monroe's 'austerity recipes' quickly became popular and Monroe herself became a recognisable figure in the media. A Girl Called Jack is part of the Mumsnet Bloggers' Network, and has been featured on the site.

In 2012 Jack Monroe became a weekly columnist for The Echo, the British media praised her grit in the face of severe financial hardship. She was later retained as an unpaid columnist for The Huffington Post, and signed a publishing deal with Penguin Group. Monroe is no longer poor but her experience of poverty still affects her, this has been compared to the early experience of poverty Charles Dickens had when his father was in a debtors' prison.

Since 2013 Monroe has written a monthly food and recipe column for The Guardian and regular political comment pieces.

Campaigning and politics

Monroe wrote

I am an active campaigner, fronting a petition with Unite, The Trussell Trust and The Mirror demanding politicians debate the causes of foodbank use and hunger in Britain. Within 4 days the petition had secured 100,000 signatures, and the debate was held in the House Of Commons three weeks later. I am a patron of The Food Chain, and support The Trussell Trust, Child Poverty Action Group, and Oxfam.

In July 2013 Jack Monroe wrote on poverty:

Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off... Poverty is the sinking feeling when your Small Boy finishes his one Weetabix and says, More Mummy? Bread and jam please Mummy? As you’re trying to work out how to carry the TV and the guitar to the pawn shop, and how to tell him that there is no bread and jam. A year ago, I was angry about my personal circumstances. Now I’m angry about everyone else’s.

Monroe wrote further on poverty:

Poverty can happen to anyone, (…) the Tory party rhetoric of ‘work hard and get on’ can fall apart in the blink of an eyelid. I worked hard. I got on. And I still spent a year and a half scrabbling around in a festering pit of depression, joblessness, benefit delays and suspensions, hunger.

In 2015 Monroe joined the Green Party of England and Wales.

Monroe wrote on Food banks

Food banks meet a need, but are not the solution. They are very good at pulling people out of the river, but someone needs to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.

Monroe wrote more on food banks

Yet the sharp rise in the number of people going hungry in our country seems to be an indicator that something has gone horribly wrong. In 2009-10, the Trussell Trust’s food banks helped 41,000 people. This has risen to 1.1 million over the past year. What use is pontificating about numbers when you are one of the million? When it’s not a statistic, but a child crying in the night because they wake up hungry?

In May 2015 the University of Essex announced that it would be awarding Monroe an honorary degree.

Personal life

The daughter of David Hadjicostas, M.B.E., a former soldier and fire-fighter with Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, and his wife Evelyn, she later changed her name to "Jack".

Jack Monroe initially worked for the fire service, she claims her work on the telephone switchboard was demanding and extremely stressful, she wrote:

People died, screaming and terrified, in my ear, (...) as I calmly delivered instructions to try to guide them to safety. (…) Many more people were saved, with authoritative direction, with empathy, by guiding them on to the floor where the smoke would have cleared, soothing them up and on to [possible escape]

Monroe wrote to a critic about her tattoos

I got my first tattoo when I was 18 (...) and continued spending my wages on my tattoos until I didn't have wages to spend on them any more. (...) I do still have them, because tattoos are permanent, so even when you're freezing and starving you can't sell them for a bit of cash.

Jack Monroe went from relative affluence to poverty and financial hardship after leaving full time work with her job at Essex County Fire and Rescue Service. Monroe claims she could not negotiate flexible work she needed to look after her baby son. On Christmas Day 2011 Monroe:

was alone in a freezing cold flat with no television, no presents and no food in the fridge – it had been turned off at the mains. [She] had no tree, no decorations, nothing to mark the day as different. [She] was unemployed, broke, and broken. [She] hadn’t bought a single present for [her] one-year-old son and, instead, let him go to his father’s for the day, knowing [she] could not give him a Christmas [herself].

Monroe described to a UK Parliamentary Committee:

cowering as bailiffs battered on the other side of [her front door] (...) going to bed shortly after [putting the baby to sleep] because there’s nothing else to do, and it’s dark, and cold, and you sold the telly, so you go to bed at 7pm and curl up beside him and hold him, because it feels like the only good thing you have. (...) Of the bank charges that mounted up when bills bounced, and (...) how quickly a £6 water charge can spiral into hundreds of pounds in late fees and bank charges, and nobody will give you the smallest of overdrafts, to tide you over, because those charges and subsequent interest are worth far more to a high street bank.

In 2014 it was reported that Monroe and her son were living with her girlfriend Allegra McEvedy and her daughter in London. In 2013, she was ranked No. 19 in The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential LGBT people in the United Kingdom.

Jack Monroe is now self employed and is a successful recipe book author. The New York Times featured Monroe as "the face of British austerity". The New Yorker has also featured her. Charities, politicians, as well as supermarket chains now look to her. Still Jack Monroe continues to campaign for poverty relief, she wrote:

So until Hunger Hurts becomes an antiquated, Dickensian fable of what life WAS like in quaintly-titled ‘Austerity Britain’, while Hunger Hurts is still true for just ONE family, let alone half a million, while people like Lord Freud can get away with pontificating on the ‘unnecessary’ nature of food banks, I must carry on. As an ambassador for Child Poverty Action Group, writing for Oxfam, raging against the machine, shouting at the rain, meeting with Government advisers and repeating again and again and again and again until they get it: “Half a million people in the UK are relying on food handouts.

Kitchen essentials

Jack Monroe's recommended kitchen equipment includes, a large and a small saucepan, a frying pan with lid, roasting tin, loaf tin, wooden spoon, masher, grater, measuring jug, general cutlery, blender, scales, mixing bowl.

Monroe claims living healthily and cheaply is possible. Still she points out white flour is cheaper than healthier whole-wheat flour, the same applies to rice and pasta. Also some tinned fruit and vegetables are cheaper than healthier fresh or frozen equivalents. Monroe's recommendations for a low budget kitchen store cupboard include, flour rice, and other carbs, proteins from yoghurt for breakfasts and sauce making, small amounts of meat and fish some tinned, also pulses including lentils baked beans, kidney beans, vegetable oil, chopped tinned tomatoes and frozen vegetables. She also recommends fresh herbs, some growing by windows, baking powder and stock cubes.

Cookery books

In 2014 Jack Monroe published her first cookery book with the title, "A Girl Called Jack". The book featured some very low cost recipes and others that are fairly inexpensive. The book features recipes like Pasta alla Genovese (19p per portion), Vegetable Masala Curry (30p per portion), Jam Sponge (23p per portion) also Fig, Rosemary and Lemon Bread (26p). Jack Monroe followed this up with, "A Year in 120 Recipes" published in October 2014.

Monroe said,

I hope that it does what I intended it to do, which is to go out into the world and teach people how to cook well for themselves; how to cook easy but delicious recipes no matter what their budget or culinary capabilities are. (…) I’m just a mum who throws together some stuff out of what’s in my cupboard, and I hope that my book goes some way towards breaking down the barriers between home cooking – what we do every day – and what people perceive recipe books to be all about.

Monroe wrote,

If you enjoy my recipes and can afford to buy one of [the books featured] please help me make a living by picking one of these up – in turn that helps me to keep [Monroe's recipe blog] free and accessible for the people who can’t afford the books. Karma.

See also

• Share Our Strength
• Jack Monroe (song)

External links

• Profile on official website