Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Jack Monroe
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British journalist Jack Monroe.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I have a surprisingly large appetite anyway and I don't drive, I walk everywhere, I don't sit down at the moment and I pace the hallway when I'm on the phone. I think that if I didn't eat large amounts of carbs and cheese I would wither away into a husk.
My bark is far, far worse than my bite.
I eventually turned the fridge and freezer off - they were empty anyway - and the boiler, desperate to save money, shocking myself awake in the morning with the shortest, coldest showers, and boiling a kettle of water twice a week to bath my young son.
Party politics are quite upsetting. I've been a member of the Labour party, the Green party, the Women's Equality Party, the National Health Action Party and now I'm not a member of any.
I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.
For some people, pronouns are a very important part of how they identify. I completely understand that. For me, I have more of a looser interpretation.
I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.
I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.
You can pretty much make anything with a base of tinned tomatoes. If I don't have tinned tomatoes in my cupboard, I start to panic - it's a genuine thing.
If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn't really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it's fresh because it's just being used in a lot of other things.
Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.
I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.
When I was at my lowest point I had a lot of help from charities, food banks, to see me through so it is nice to start to give something back.
I think I'll be around as long as there is a market for simple, basic, non-intimidating food.
I'm publicist, patron of nine charities, creative director, food consultant, recipe developer - and mum.
I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.
I had such a run of bad luck that you lose faith that good things are going to happen any more. I still don't answer the door because I went through so long expecting it to be a bailiff.
I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was... the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you've got a fantastic dinner on the table.
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.
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.
I remember going on adventures with my older brother and, when I was 11, being allowed to go to the corner shop alone, and filling up a bag with penny chews, Fruit Salads, Bruiser bars and Black Jacks.
I'm well-known for saying unsayable things.
Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.
Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.
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.
My politics are food-related - food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts - and my food is political.
My parents tended to cook big batch food because there was always the possibility that other children would turn up with their carrier bag and shoes and we had to gently bring them out of their shells.
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.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.
I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food.
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.
Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.
I'm very careful with the money I have, I pay myself the living wage, and I try to save the rest, because if life has taught me one thing it's that you never know what is around the corner.
I've had success, but I'm still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you've lived it it never leaves you.
I think as much as people moan at things like award ceremonies, it gives people role models. It provides real positive reinforcement that you can be who you are and still massively achieve.
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.
If I've learned anything in the last seven or eight years it's that my career flies by the seat of my pants and that every time I'm booked for something, I'm ill, and anything - like a TV opportunity - I treat as my last ever one because it's maybe my swansong.
Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.
I live in a world where I want everyone to be able to put beurre blanc on the table for dinner.
Because I'm in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.
All kids are fussy eaters - they go through phases where they'll only eat red food or they just want to eat porridge. With fussy kids, the best thing to do is use what they do like and work around it.
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 thing with my recipes is, I don't have hours to faff about in the kitchen. My recipes are all 15, 20 minute, chop it up and stick it in the oven.
Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.
I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.
We hear time and again what a prosperous, affluent country Britain is, the sixth richest in the world. But aren't we ashamed that people who need emergency food handouts are eating cold beans and stewed steak from the tin, or handing it back, because they can't even heat it up?
People nag me about my weight, my cooking, my tattoos, my hair, my sexuality, everything. I can deal with all that because I'm still doing my job and I kind of like myself.
I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more.
Don't say things about people that aren't true... because there are consequences for that.
As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since.
I was a bit of an accident really - I certainly didn't set out to write a cookbook or three. I didn't have a plan. I was unemployed, writing a blog about local politics and a few recipes, and it was more successful than I could ever have imagined it to be.
Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger, and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do.
You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!
When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.
I can be wildly enthusiastic and want to try to do everything that I feel would be useful and educational and beneficial - but I've crashed and burned a few times.
Politics has become so polarised. We're stuck between the Ukip-lite Tories and Jeremy Corbyn. How is that a choice?
And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.
Working 90 hours a week is easily racked up when you're self-employed and rely on portable tech to do your work; your train journeys, toilet breaks, leisurely walks, bedtime, can all become 'working hours'. Reclaim them.
I spent 18 months with the furniture parked in front of the radiators, cooking as quickly as I possibly could to use the least amount of gas and electricity. I unscrewed the lightbulbs in the hallway, unplugged everything at the wall so not even the LCD display was blinking away on the oven.
I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.
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