Jack Monroe off Twitter

[beammeuphottie]

The latest in the ongoing saga is that JM has left Twitter after being 'hounded off'. The incident that seemed to provoke this...someone critiquing a photo of her mums roast potatoes. It just gets more and more bizarre.

To be clear, I don't like to see public pile ons and some of the abuse directed at Jack has been unpleasant. But a lot has also been reasonable, polite requests for information regarding her patreon which have largely been totally ignored. And her supporters have to be some of the most cruel people on Twitter. It seems like it's fine for JM to voice her opinion but as soon as others do the same they are called out for bullying. And ironically subjected to vile comments from her followers. Go figure.

Am I the only one who thinks she's probably best having a little Twitter break? But eventually if she's ever to redeem her reputation she needs to show some transparency regarding public donations.

1. A lovely refreshing cucumber salad: slice 5 thin slices and out on a plate and enjoy.

1. A delicious fresh crudite plate. Cut an inch of cucumber and slice into batons

1. Roasted tomato.take 1/4 of your tomatoand roast for 35 minutes, splash with some balsamic drizzle (4p for ⅛ TSP)

1. Poach a pear. Just slice off a ¼ of the fruit and boil in water.

1. A delightful cucumber and tomato salad.

1. A lovely little tomato salsa

1. A cucumber and pear smoothie

1. A cubed cucumber bowl

1. A pudding of pear slices in a bowl

10. An entire ½ cucumber, sliced length ways, and topped with reminder of tomato. Finish off the pear for dessert, if you have room!

If you'd got the train to the next town, and then caught the bus to the other side, and then walked the 3.5 miles, to Aldi, you could have saved yourself 15p, and only spent £1.45.

Be frugal, be smart.

I remember that book too. For context, £35 a week back in 1990 would have been £70 last year before inflation and food prices went crazy.

It's just dangerous nonsense to claim that anyone is getting decent calories for under £1 a meal and that would be if your £20 was only for 1 person.

Well of course. Give me a sec I will just do quick check of my cupboards and freezers. 😁

Surely you already have a painstakingly handwritten list of all your stored food?

My adhd made me forget where I softly, gently put my list to.

(I do really have it so I can make that joke. Frankly she is pissing me off with it. As if hmrc would forgive me forgetting company's accounts🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄. Making us all look like thieving twats)

Natch, because keeping a spreadsheet would mean I have a computer ... Which I CLEARLY DON'T as I have to apply for jobs on my measly iPhone 18+ Pro special edition. I never seem to get any jobs, not sure why tbh as getting work is actually really easy and it's just lazy people that don't work. My phone, i pay for by doing my mysterious work 100 hrs a week for no money, after paying my rent which is actually 135% of my weekly earnings, so i only have 5p left each month which I have to feed my dog and child on. And the random person living with me.
It's actually quite easy to do this, I throw away so many leftovers it's actually costing me money to get extra bin collections, but it only works out at £9.67 a day, so definitely cheaper than not cooking it in the first place.

So, yeah, stop complaining, because I live in actual poverty in my 5 bedroom, beautifully furnished, heated actual dump.

How many are you feeding?

I could provide all of that for 4 hungry adults (two employed in manual labour) and a dog.

I hop you aren't wasting the core of that pear!

*hope

I do hop a lot though - all of those calories fill me with excess energy that I have to get rid of somehow.

00100001, was with you until the banquet at number 10. Such extravagance. Your frugal credentials are blown.

Yes agree. Although supermarket expansion and competition thru the 90s/00s (and I guess Common Agricultural Policy) would have brought down the price of food so not necessarily comparing apples and oranges (one of each feeding a big family for a month).

Pre-2020 I could have comfortably fed my family of four on £70 a week.

That wasn't me. And it was actually funded by my very good friends who always want the come over for my lovely suppers of baked beans from the tin. 10 of us will share a tin, and I'll use the leftovers for a gut buster brekkie the next day. I have lots of friends. I do. Because they're always popping over to their poorest friend and eating all their food, because that's just what all my ever so good friends do, because they all (and there's lots of them) love my baked beans a la can and aren't at all concerned that I am clearly living in dire poverty and van absolutely afford to share my good, because whilst I go hungry, my meals will feed a family of 5 for 3 days for around £1.46. (depending on the price if pickled pilchards on any given day) so there's plenty of food to spare in my hovel house.

With the best will in the world, when she first came to public attention she was not gaunt with jutting collarbones. I remember the initial appearances in the Mirror and Guardian. She appeared a well fed, healthy and indeed good looking young woman. Good skin, healthy colour, healthy thick hair etc. More importantly, so did her little boy.

It shoudn't matter, but she undermines herself when she tries to make herself appear more destitute than she really is. I read an interview with her in the Wall Street Journal where she said she had lived rough for two years. That surprised me as I had read a few of her things in the Guardian and online and she never said that. You'd have thought it would be a pretty formative experience. Street homelessness leaves lasting traumas...if one survives it (life expectancy once fully on the streets is just over a year iirc).

I read an interview with her in the Wall Street Journal where she said she had lived rough for two years. That surprised me as I had read a few of her things in the Guardian and online and she never said that. You'd have thought it would be a pretty formative experience.

Wasn't she binary (or non-binary - I forget which) at one point? Maybe half of her lived under the underpass and breakfasted off the dregs of Special Brew discarded by tramps, and the other half holidayed in Venice and got some new tattoos and a hairdo by Toni and Guy. Then they fell out and didn't speak to each other for years.

(life expectancy once fully on the streets is just over a year iirc).

Just noticed this last sentence - that's awful! Those poor buggers.

Yes. It's because of the high correlation of severe addiction issues and street life. Mix heavy alcohol / drug use and exposure to cold / damp plus lack of sleep and you do not have a recipe for a long life.

This is even truer for women on the streets who are also exposed to higher levels of abuse and more vulnerable to hypothermia.

It's very rare in this country for women to be fully street homeless. The bulk of the numbers is male armed forces veterans with PTSD and addictions.

Street homelessness is truly a hell on earth and I would be amzed that Jack would claim it if it were not true.

if it is true then I would like her to speak out about these experiences as it is extremely rare in this country for the mother of a young child to end up on the streets and it would be important to understand how the safety net failed in this instance, given her large and supportive family.

A Commons select Committee appearance would be good. The Cross Parliamentary select Committee on homelessness is currently doing important work and I think they should hear from Jack as her story would be so rare and so important.

She did do Sleep Easy with the YMCA in 2013 to raise awareness. Where she sobbed about how close she came to it. cookingonabootstrap.com/2013/03/02/sleeping-rough-in-a-car-park/?amp=1

When was she supposed to be homeless for 2 years!?

She gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which she said she lived rough for two years.

I have checked this morning with an American friend as to whether 'living rough' means something different in American English but no, it means the same as it does here ie street homeless.

Cos she says she went from £27k to almost homeless in 6 months.

So prior to 2013, never homeless, but scared of eviction during those 6 months.

So what, post 2013, 2 years of homelessness?! After coming to public attention? 🤔

How delightfully gamine she looks in that link. 😶 A cynic might think that she was very aware of how to take advantage of being photogenic.

I don't know. Maybe she was vulnerably housed before her £27k a year job and it got lost in translation?

Anyway, she actually came to attention in 2012. In an interview to the New York Times she said she 'came out as poor' in her Hunger Hurts blog of 2012 and at that point her parents dropped off bags of food on her doorstep and 'berated' her for not tleling them sooner. www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/world/europe/jack-monroe-has-become-britains-austerity-celebrity.html

So after 2012 she was no longer destitute I guess. So dstitution took places at some point prior to that date.

But I'm pretty sure she claimed it was giving up her job because she couldn't manage childcare that plunged her into poverty.

Not something she'd experienced before as a self-described "middle-class, well-educated young woman who fell a bit by the wayside".

It just doesn't add up.

I'm surprised that her parents, who had fostered many other children over decades, couldn't be asked to look after their own grandson so that she could continue to work.

I don't know. I've just always been struck by the rough sleeping for two years because I know how rare it is for women to be rough sleeping for that period of time. And almost unheard of for mothers with children in the UK. So I would want to hear her talk more about it. Rough sleepers rarely get their voices heard in society and even charities like Shelter and Crisis are rebalanced towards talking more about the vulnerably housed and re-classifying them as homeless. I don't have a problem with that by the way. But it does mean that the most entrnehced and difficult to solve core of street homelessness gets ignored.

I'm going to come out and say it smells like baloney.