I’m busier than I’ve ever known myself to be,” says Jack Monroe as we sit down to talk in her pleasantly cluttered bungalow in Southend-on-Sea. “I get up at 6.30am and work till 11pm. Every hour is accounted for. When I want to have fun with my partner, I’m like, ‘I’ll claw in an hour to go out for dinner with you but I’ve got to work when I get home.’”
From Monroe’s point of view, this is not a bad development. “It’s finally started to pay off,” she says of the past six years of writing cookbooks, fronting supermarket campaigns and establishing herself as one of the most outspoken voices on poverty in the UK. “Suddenly I feel like I’ve got the balance right, although some would argue that working 90 hours a week isn’t balance.”
We’re in Monroe’s living room amid teetering piles of cookbooks and the 30-year-old is, for a few precious moments, sitting still. (Monroe, who identifies as non-binary, sometimes goes by the pronoun “they” but suggested I call her “she” here for the purposes of clarity.) Soon, though, she will jump up to check on the bacon mac ’n’ cheese she’s recipe-testing, or to prevent her squash, which will be paired with lentils and homemade labneh, from roasting to a crisp.
These are the unfussy, hearty dishes you’d expect from Monroe, whose mission is to help people eat beautifully on a tight budget, but they’re not the extent of her repertoire. “I’ve got a whole other side to my cooking which nobody gets to see,” she confides, “which is a bit Heston-y, a bit scientific. One year I did a gorgonzola ice cream with a black olive crumble as the cheese course. I did beetroot-pickled king prawns with a Marie Rose ice cream as a twist on a prawn cocktail.” Devising budget recipes, however, she finds more challenging, more rewarding. “Anyone can cook brilliantly if money’s no object and they’ve got all the equipment and skills at their disposal, but if you’ve only got a tin of tomatoes and a tin of sardines, you need to know your stuff – how to balance those flavours, how to knock that slightly fishy taste out of the sardines.”
Clearly the inspiration is still flowing. Her third cookbook, Cooking On A Bootstrap, has only just been published but Monroe is already writing the next two – a clever-sounding book about cooking from tins, out next spring, and a collection of vegan recipes the following year. As for her numerous other projects – a YouTube “chop and chat” channel that’s about to launch, a partnership she’s developing with a major retailer – it takes her the best part of an hour to outline them all.
Then there’s her campaign work, which underscores everything she does and takes many forms. “One day I could be meeting an MP to discuss nutritional health policy,” she says, “the next I’ll be giving a talk at a food bank.”
It’s more than six years since Monroe burst into our awareness with a despairing blog post about the realities of life at the sharp edge of austerity. Eloquent about her struggles to feed herself and her son after being forced to give up her job in the Essex fire service, “Hunger Hurts” was read by 1.4 million people.
It changed her life. A year later, Monroe had a book deal and a recipe column in the Guardian, which dubbed her the “face of modern poverty”. Since then, she has rarely been out of the public eye, appearing on breakfast shows and news panels to challenge anyone who defends Tory cuts or criticises the poor for unhealthy eating.
On television and social media, Monroe can be combative and funny, though she combines this with an empathy that extends even to her enemies. When Katie Hopkins recently applied for an insolvency agreement after losing a libel case to Monroe last year, the response was strikingly muted. “I’m supposed to be jubilant and celebratory,” Monroe told the Guardian, “but I feel quite mixed up. Having been close to the edge of bankruptcy myself, it’s a hideous situation to be in.”
She has a theory about Hopkins. “I just think that she got some validation from being a bit unkind, and has had to develop that character in order to continue to receive that validation,” she tells me. When Monroe gets abuse online, some of it violently horrible, she tries not to take it personally. “Clearly it comes from somebody who’s in a really sad place,” she says, “because ordinary, well-balanced people aren’t spending their lives trying to take other people down.”
Happily, Monroe’s detractors are greatly outnumbered by supportive readers. “I get about 2,000-3,000 interactions per day,” she says, “emails, social media, DMs and letters – people still write letters, it’s lovely.” A lot of it’s about food, and Monroe responds to queries about what to use if you don’t have cumin or kidney beans, but it goes broader than that. “There’s lots about life challenges. Some of it’s about arthritis, autoimmune diseases and disabilities [Monroe has rheumatoid arthritis], some is about life in general.”
Monroe tends to have robust opinions on any subject you throw at her. Brexit, she believes, is an “absolute folly – food is going to become more expensive, supply chains more bureaucratic not less. I just wish everyone who voted Leave could spend a month living off apples, spuds and chlorinated chicken, and see how fun it is.”
As for food poverty, it’s now “a lot worse” than in 2012, when Monroe was suffering the effects of it. “The number of food banks in Britain has more than doubled in that time. It’s become systemic now. We’ve got food bank boxes at the end of checkouts in supermarkets. It’s a mindless, always-in-the-background thing, it’s not shocking any more. People say, ‘Oh, are you still banging on about food banks?’ Well yeah, because they’re still there.”
Outrage at social inequality aside, one reason Monroe works so hard is the fear of running on borrowed time. “Every book I publish, I think this is the end of the road,” she says.
But that fear is starting to abate. “Now that I have a deal for two more books I’m like, oh this is actually a thing now. I’ve started to believe that this might be my job. And turning 30, a switch has flipped. Before, I was just going with the flow. Now I’ve got a plan – to grow my business, to write another 10 books, to still be doing this in 10 years.” She stands up and shakes my hand, eager to get back to the kitchen. “I’m serious about it now.”
