In the middle of 2020, Jack Monroe suffered what she describes as “a proper breakdown”. Lockdown had set in, she’d lost a huge amount of work due to event cancellations and the abuse she was receiving online was becoming too much to bear. “It sent me into the darkest space that I’ve ever been in,” she recalls. (Monroe, who identifies as non-binary, sometimes goes by the pronoun “they” but suggested I use “she” for the purposes of clarity.)
It took a lot of “very intensive” therapy, and going sober, to lift her out again. She also needed to slow down. Over the previous eight years, since her blog post Hunger Hurts hit the headlines, Monroe had established herself not just as a cookbook author but as an influential voice on food poverty in Britain, railing against austerity as well as suggesting affordable ways to survive it. The experience was both exhilarating and exhausting. When I met Monroe in 2018, she estimated she was working 90 hours a week. A few months later she revealed her struggles with alcoholism. Now, after the turmoil of lockdown, which coincided with a difficult break-up, she felt burnt out.
“I just wanted to put the brakes on for a bit and go, right, I’m going to work normal human hours, spend some quality time with my son and have a quiet time,” she says. That lasted for a couple of months. “Then the cost of living crisis hit, and I did a tweet, and life went nuts.”
The tweet, posted as a thread on 19 January, was “about the retail prices index and the Office for National Statistics figures not matching up with people’s personal levels of inflation, especially people with the least disposable income”. She calculated that in the past year, the prices of the cheapest available pasta and rice (among other things) in her local supermarkets had gone up far in excess of the inflation rate – outstripping the price rises of more expensive products. Where certain budget range basics were unavailable, some shoppers were looking at triple-digit inflation for the alternatives. A few days later, Monroe wrote about the issue for the Observer, explaining that she was working on her own price index (“It’s coming. I’m doing it,” she tells me.) The ONS had also taken note. “That went absolutely viral,” she says. “Suddenly I went from being a budget baked-bean blogger to having a double-page spread in the Times saying why supermarkets need to listen to the new economist Jack Monroe.”
A month later, Monroe was in the news again, after celebrating the return of more budget items to her local branch of Asda. (Asda said they had “taken onboard” Monroe’s comments and were making their cheaper lines more available). Now, as winter draws in, the 34-year-old is busier than ever, fielding interview requests to debate the cost of living crisis and dish out advice. Alongside her activism, she is still writing cookbooks (the next one, her seventh, is Thrifty Kitchen, published in January).
Meanwhile, the abuse has worsened. The police, she says, have advised her to hire a bodyguard for public appearances. Online, critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is. “Yeah, it’s funny because they all want to allege that I live in this big mansion in the middle of nowhere,” she retorts. “But in the four years I’ve lived in this house [in Southend-on-Sea], probably 30 journalists have been around it, and if it did have a pool and five Jaguars on the driveway, one of them might have said something.”
Winning a reader-voted award helps provide incentive to keep going, though she credits “a sense of raging injustice and an awful lot of coffee” as her main drivers. “It’s really nice to be appreciated,” she says. “And it’s encouraging for other people to see that, occasionally, hard work does get recognised.”
