Jack monroe challenged on twitter

[KarlWrenbury]

Maybe by a sock puppet account Etc but yes- how are they still not making ends meet after all this time ?

Really?!

Really. I'm sure I'm being incredibly thick but what is it? The architecture? The fact it's in English (presumably the other books were too?)?

The Georgia Churches cookbook is not about the country of Georgia, but about the state of Georgia in the US. It's a Baptist churches of Georgia cookbook.

The look. The food. The .. English

A quick Google shows it's definitely American, I just can't see what's on the cover to prove it.

The weird ham with pineapple 😂

I think what bothers me is the entitlement. Lots of people have careers they would have loved to do. Say someone dearly wanted to be a professional knitter. It was something they loved doing, were good at, truly believed that everyone should be knitting and it would single-handedly save the british wool industry. And they have a wee bit of success talking on social media about knitting, or writing books about knitting. They become known as Britain's leading campaigner on knitting.

But it's not enough to maintain their lifestyle. They love their knitting and truly believe in it but can't really afford rent, or daily expenses on their knitting income. So what do they do?

They get a job.

This is where Jack/Melissa differs. She is not a stupid woman. She could have at any point over the last 5-10 years got a proper job to keep her afloat while she worked on building her brand or whatever but no, she asked other people to pay her instead. That's pretty brass-necked. Leaving aside all the fibs which have now come out . If you can't support yourself doing thing A, then thing A is not viable. However "worthy" you think your thing is.

It's a typical regional style church. The Georgians in Eastern Europa are Orthodox, their churches aren't like that. And a quick scoot on Amazon also tells you what the book is about. For most people, though, the picture gives it away already or at least raises suspicion.

Sorry, cross posts.

Tbh, it's got that low-budget, dated look that you often get from that sort of publication and I don't know enough about Georgian (European) food to know what it looks like. The English didn't seem too suspect since the other books she listed presumably came in English versions and I've got some English language cookbooks from other countries.

Anyway, thank you. It is definitely American, I was just going a bit nuts because I couldn't see how the cover alone gave it away.

That's exactly it though, she probably assumed other people wouldn't notice.
I have a thing about American food so I did, but in isolation it's no biggie to tell a fairly insignificant fib about cookbooks, but once you put everything together it just shows that very little that she says is true, including it seems never being poor in the first place.
Everything about her is a lie, bad enough in itself, but she has been taking money from actual poor people to continue the lie.

Jack Monroe campaigns for Jack Monroe to not be in poverty.

Her ridiculous story about the woman in the pub here on the MN forum and her article about poverty shouldn’t happen to someone ‘normal’ like her cause she doesn’t sit watching Jeremy Kyle, eating burgers all day just shows how much contempt she has for the people she’s supposed to be helping. Her life is full of lazy sterotyping for click bait headlines and tip jar rattling. I’m glad she’s been caught out, it’s about time.

@WhereAreMyAirpods I don’t think wanting to work in the creative arts means you are entitled. The Tories peddle this nonsense. They ran a campaign saying ballet dancers should work in tech. What you and they are really saying is only posh people who can afford it should take a chance and work in the arts as a freelancer. It’s awful that’s where we are in the UK now.

The thing I keep on coming back to is that she has a kid who must be about 12 by now, and she writes about him as if he were a toddler (or just harks back to his toddler days).

I would not like to be that kid, wherever his secondary school is. All that stuff about "mummy please can I have bread and jam" and all the weetabix-and-water posts, never mind the chaos and the lies and the grifting, is just going to be excruciatingly embarrassing for him.

He's either a tiny toddler or a teenager depending on what given day it is, she was also letting him manage her twitter account for the summer according to what she said the other week.
There's also the selling of his favourite toys and the sex work he must know about from when that didn't happened.

But when Jack claims two mutually exclusive things (she has a toaster, she doesn't have a toaster; she lived on the streets, she lived in a house) then she must be lying. How do you reconcile this?

I don’t think wanting to work in the creative arts means you are entitled. The Tories peddle this nonsense. They ran a campaign saying ballet dancers should work in tech. What you and they are really saying is only posh people who can afford it should take a chance and work in the arts as a freelancer.

I agree, but the point is that Jack has made enough money to live on over the years. Yes, she's probably burned through a lot of it, spending it on designer stuff, but that's her problem, not anyone elses. Her latest grift isn't 'I'm not making enough money to live', it's 'please keep me in the style I'm accustomed to', which is where the entitlement comes in. Not so long ago (maybe a couple of months, if that) she was tweeting about how if she saved enough deposit she was looking to buy a house or flat in the region of £500,000. Now apparently she can't afford to buy shampoo and conditioner? This isn't someone on the bones of her arse.

I applaud anyone who gives their chosen career a go, especially if it means them being short of money for a time. But if, like Jack claims, you haven't made it or it isn't paying you a fair wage after ten years, the sad truth is a) you probably weren't good enough in the first place and b) you need to start looking at doing something else or at least something that will supplement you along side it. And that's without going into the whole thing of whether Jack is a posh person or working class (I'll give you a clue here. She's definitely not working class. She's grammar educated, her grandad was a landlord who left an estate of £1.3 million, and her dad has an MBE and had a high up job in the fire service).

The grandfather’s huge £1.3 (£1.8?) million estate is a puzzle. She’s spoken many times of being close to her grandparents, and also to her parents, and probate was granted shortly before the time she claims to have been sleeping rough. Whilst it’s possible she didn’t receive an inheritance directly, it seems unlikely that her parents who did, who if close to her can hardly not have noticed that she was sleeping on the streets, wouldn’t have given some financial support.

@ComtesseDeSpair yes, sorry, I think it was actually £1.8 million. And yes, that story also doesn't add up, but I think her foodbank story has also changed over time. She was a 'regular user', then she only used it once, then her parents got wind of her maybe going to one and came over and helped her out.

As usual, she can't keep track of her lies and nothing adds up. It's even possible that her whole persona is down to her parents not buying her a house outright. She seems obsessed with not being able to buy her own home (something that's out of reach for a lot of people these days, and I'm saying that that's right or wrong, but Jack does seem to have a peculiar entitlement around it).

Re the cookbook, it did take me a second too as I wasn’t sure what Georgian (the country) food and churches would look like, but it was the title that didn’t sound Eastern European. “church suppers” is such a deep-south-sounding thing to write a book about and it has that church-produced look. I have books of Russian and Greek cookery and they don’t look like that - if a book like that is written in English for English readers, it tends to have a design in the style of the country and a title like “traditional recipes of Russia” etc.

Given Amazon’s appalling search function, it probably did pop up when searching for Eastern Europe in cookbooks.

I didn’t know the alcoholism was claimed to be 200 units a week! That’s nearly 30 a day and she doesn’t look like a large person. I thought Dylan Thomas dropped dead from less!

Also a 200-unit a week alcohol habit would cost a lot, several hundred a month. Has she said that’s where a lot of her money was going?

The Georgia cookbook episode really does show the barefaced level of her lies!

@TrashPandas Both of things can be true. It depends when she said them. I have been poor. I am not poor now.

They cover the exact same time periods.

I'm very curious why you're determined to defend her when you don't know anything about it... why is that?

No. Except she said that she'd saved all the money she used to spend on alcohol in a separate account to give her son a lovely summer. Which I guess he's now not going to get.

@TrashPandas I didn’t know they cover the same periods. Why shouldn’t I defend her? I just dislike this social media pile on. It’s awful.