Jack Monroe Quotes

"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."

"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 live in a world where I want everyone to be able to put beurre blanc on the table for dinner."

"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."

"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."

"I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one."

"Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure."

"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."

"My bark is far, far worse than my bite."

"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."

"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've had success, but I'm still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you've lived it it never leaves you."

"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."

"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."

"You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!"

"I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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'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 left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more."

"Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup."