Jack Monroe rose to fame with her blog about cooking on a tight budget. Here, our new recipe columnist shares her journey from the breadline to the Tory conferenceJack Monroe's beetroot, feta and lentil salad
She has become, as she puts it, "the face of modern poverty" and it is a tag that Jack Monroe doesn't seem completely comfortable with. Of course she is a passionate and effective anti-poverty campaigner – she spoke at both the Labour and Tory party conferences, and is an ambassador for the Child Poverty Action Group and Oxfam – but she could probably do without the people who scour her blog for hints of hypocrisy, or tell her to get a job. She says the attention she has received since starting her blog, A Girl Called Jack, in which she writes about surviving as an unemployed single mother, has felt "very strange".
And anyway, she does have a job. She unsuccessfully applied for hundreds after leaving her previous role as a call handler for the fire service because she couldn't fit the shift work around childcare. So her new role is self-made. After her blog brought her a lot of attention (including Twitter fanmail from the likes of Nigel Slater and a Fortnum & Mason food and drink award), she was asked to write for national newspapers and got a book deal. As G2's new recipe columnist she says it feels good to be taken seriously as a food writer, "rather than my life being plastered all over the internet".
Her recipes won't be the ones that made her blog famous – the supermarket value-range vegetable packs for soup, or casseroles made with the cheapest cooking bacon – when she was forced to spend no more than £10 a week on food for her and her son, "because there's only so far you can go with that, and not everybody has to live on such a tight budget". But it will be cooking on a budget, often on less than £1 a head.
We meet at her flat in Southend, which she shares with her three-year-old son, partner and pet ferrets and guinea pigs. Despite recovering from bronchitis and repeatedly apologising for not being her usual self, she is warm and friendly. She has spent the morning cooking. A pan of sausage and beans in a rich tomato sauce sits on the hob in the neat kitchen: "It's one of my favourite combinations. They're baked beans but I just rinsed the sauce off them." Her basic building blocks – tins of tomatoes and beans, and some stock cubes – sit on the counter.
Food has always been important to her. Her father is Greek Cypriot and her mother Irish, so there was a range of dishes at home – avgolemono soup from her dad, colcannon with sausages from her mum, and "great roast dinners". Her grandfather used to run a restaurant and then he ran "a row of guest houses just tucked off the seafront. He would give my brother and me odd jobs to do. I remember the sense of pride I felt when I was upgraded from making the tea to frying my first egg." She adds: "We would spend afternoons there reading newspapers and chomping stuffed vine leaves, Greek meatballs, squid rings and brawn."
Monroe only really started cooking when she took a food technology GCSE at school. "It was an escape from letters and numbers, a place where I could flex my creative side. 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." She says she was "overjoyed" when it was announced that cooking lessons would be a compulsory part of the national curriculum from next year.
When she had to give up work and went from a £27,000-a-year job to living on income support and housing benefit, "everything else was cut back first – heating, lighting, going out, buying things". Things that could be sold, were. "After you've cut back everything else, food is the last to go. I didn't mind putting an extra jumper on if I had food in the fridge. It was the point where I had an extra jumper on and no food in the fridge that I realised things had gone badly wrong."
Eating for just £10 a week and often having to rely on a local food bank was the lowest point. "It's very difficult to eat well. You do end up eating the same things all the time." It isn't just the lack of ingredients that is limiting; it is the relentless psychological toll of having to live on so little. Monroe found herself eating 77p ready meals, "because I had lost the will to cook, because everything else had gone so wrong. It was only when I realised I needed to be eating better and put three meals on the table for myself and my son that I started to cook again."
Until you have lived like that, she says, it is hard to understand the reality of daily life. Although she has taken inspiration from the likes of Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay (her chilli recipe is adapted from Ramsay's), she points out their limitations for those on a budget – there is no point celebrity chefs telling people to buy cheaper cuts of meat if they need to be slow-cooked in the oven for hours, wasting money on gas or electricity. "It might not occur to other people that you don't have two hours to cook something, or fancy equipment to prepare certain dishes. You may only have a two-ring hob, or one pan. I don't cost [fuel prices] into my recipes, but I do try to make sure everything is quite quick."
She knows where to get bargains – Waitrose, she reveals, is great for meat shopping, as it offers a good range of cheaper cuts – and can still rattle off the prices of her local supermarket's basics range by heart: "Chopped tomatoes 35p, kidney beans 21p, stock cubes 20p, rice 40p a kilo. I know when they change the prices. It never seems to be the 'finest' ranges or the branded stuff that goes up in price, it's always the basic ranges." When every single penny had to be accounted for during her most stretched times, this could mean the difference between getting everything she planned or putting something back on the shelf. Life, thankfully, isn't like that for her now, but she points out that it still is for many other people in this country.
Monroe still lives on a careful food budget of about £20 a week for herself, her partner and son – she has only received a portion of her book advance so far, and that went on paying bills and clearing debts. "It's nice to know [the rest is] coming and to have a bit of security," she says, adding: "I'm still sticking to a budget, which is partly out of habit and partly to keep things level." She knows how quickly life can change. "I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food." She smiles. "I don't feel I'm missing out. I still eat really well." Food is important, marking special moments in her life: "The last time I celebrated a special occasion, I hashed together a paella with some chicken, some frozen veg, long-grain rice, chilli and a shake of turmeric for colour – and it didn't disappoint." The days of the 77p ready meals seem far away.
And the offers keep coming. Monroe has been approached to do her own TV series. "I don't want to do something just for the sake of it, just because it's hot and you can sell it, so we're in talks and trying to marry up our visions." She smiles. "I want to do something that has a purpose and is useful."
Food & drinkPovertySocial exclusionEmine Sanertheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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